THE WORKS OF
CHARLES DICKENS
NATIONAL EDITION
VOLUME
XVIII
National Eibrarii tlHtintt
THE WORKS OF
CHARLES DICKENS
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MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
PLAYS AND POEMS
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MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
From 'The Examiner,' 'Household Words,
and 'All the Year Round'
PLAYS AND POEMS
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
2506 j 87
The 'Miscellaneous Papers' appeared in the
pages of 'The Examiner,' 'Household Words/
and 'All the Year Round' during the years 1838
— 1869, many of which have been now identified
for the first time {see introduction to this vol-
ume}.
Of the six Plays included in this Edition, the
first three were written by Dickens for the St.
James's Theatre, London, under Braham's man-
agement. 'The Strange Gentleman,' 'The Vil-
lage Coquettes,' and 'Is she his Wife?' were first
performed in that theatre on September 29,
1836, December 6, 1836, and March 6, 1837 re-
spectively, and were, soon after each perform-
ance, published in pamphlet form; 'The Lamp-
lighter' was written in 1838, but did not meet
with the approval of Macready and his company
for whom it was written, and was withdrawn and
afterwards converted into the story with the
same name: it is reprinted from the manuscript
in the Forster Collection in the Victoria and
Albert Museum; 'Mr. Nightingale's Diary' was
written by Dickens and Mark Lemon, and was
first performed at Devonshire House on May 27,
1851, and printed as a pamphlet in that year;
'No Thoroughfare' was written by Dickens and
Wilkie Collins, and was first performed at the
New Royal Adelphi Theatre, London, on De-
cember 26, 1867, and published in pamphlet
form in the same year.
'The Poems' were collected from various
sources in 1903, and edited with bibliographical
notes by F. G. Kitton, whose work is retained in
the present Edition. To these, three recently
discovered poems are added (see introduction).
INTRODUCTION
IN planning the 'National' Edition of the Works of Charle
Dickens, the publishers decided that the volumes should be
free from anything in the way of introductory matter, be-
yond the brief bibliographical note which prefaces each work.
In the case, however, of these two volumes of Miscellanies
it is felt that a few editorial notes are necessary, for the
reason that their contents have never before been included
in any collection of the author's works, whilst a great quan-
tity of the material, notably the majority of Dickens's con-
tributions to Household Words, is now identified for the first
time.
It is not our intention to attempt to 'place' these contribu-
tions to The Examiner, Household Words, and All the Year
Round of the author of the immortal Pickwick, or to offer
any estimate of their comparative value in the scheme of
Dickens's work as a whole. Our object has been to gather
together all Dickens's writings, from whatever source avail-
able, that can be said to be worthy, as the scattered writings
of other authors have been gathered together, and added to
existing editions. And in doing so, we make no apology,
for it will be found that the majority of these articles, essays,
and stories are not the efforts of immaturity, but the work of
a great writer composed during the prime of his literary
career.
The contents of the two volumes are arranged in five sec-
tions under headings of The Examiner, Household Words,
All the Year Round, Plays, and Poems. Dickens's other
ix
x MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
articles and sketches from The Morning Chronicle, The
Daily News, The Times, his contributions to certain period-
ical literature, and his introductions to books, which the
publishers announced would form part of the scheme of the
'National' Edition of his works, and which have never before
appeared in a collected edition of the novelist's writings, will
be found added, for convenience in grouping, to Reprinted
Pieces, which forms volume xxxiv. of the series. These
pieces have always been known to exist, and therefore need
no comment, in that respect, here, except the one entitled
'The Spirit of Chivalry in Westminster Hall,' which is re-
printed from the galley proof in the Forster Collection in
the Victoria and Albert Museum. There is no indication on
the proof where this article appeared, and we were unable to
discover the magazine in which it was published until after
the volume had been printed, when we learned that it was to
be found in Douglas Jerrold's Magazine for August 1845.
Although it was cut down in that periodical obviously to fit
a certain space, we have given it in its entirety.
It will be seen, therefore, that the publishers' announce-
ment that the 'National' Edition would be the most complete
and comprehensive ever published, may well 'be considered as
justified.
Regarding the Miscellanies in these two volumes, there are
one or two notes and annotations to be recorded.
Dickens was probably a frequent contributor to the pages
of The Examiner during the editorship of his friend John
Forster, but beyond the statements made by his biographer,
there is no means of identifying his contributions. In the
following pages everything is reprinted that can be traced
under Forster's guidance, and in hunting these out from the
files of his old paper, we have been a little more fortunate
than previous searchers. Richard Herne Shepherd was
INTRODUCTION xi
probably the first to place on record some of the dates of the
publication of these articles. More recently Frederic G.
Kitton devoted much time and energy to amplifying the list,
and reprinted many of them, with others from different
sources, in a volume entitled To be Read at Dusk; and other
Stories, Sketches and Essays, by Charles Dickens, published
by George Redway in 1898. But both he and Mr. Shepherd
were unable to trace the following articles, the MSS. of
which are in the Forster Collection in the Victoria and Albert
Museum. (1) 'London Crime,' (2) 'Judicial Special Plead-
ing,' (3) 'Edinburgh Apprentice School Association,' (4)
'Macready as "King Lear,'" (5) 'Latour's "Virginie" and
Douglas Jerrold's "Black-Eyed Susan,"' (6) 'The Tooting
Farm,' and (7) 'The Paradise at Tooting.'
We have, however, been more successful, and these articles
now appear, in chronological order, with the rest. The title
of the first of these was altered in the pages of The Exam-
iner to 'Ignorance and Crime,' and the fourth appeared un-
der the heading of 'Restoration of Shakespeare's Lear to
the Stage.' There is also a third article, noted in Thomson's
Bibliography, on the Tooting Farm scandal entitled 'The
Verdict for Drouet,' and although Forster does not mention
it, it is included here, as there seems no doubt from internal
evidence that Dickens wrote it. Besides this, it completes
the story of the scandal. It is interesting to note in regard
to these Drouet articles, that Dickens refers to the subject
of them more than once in his Household Words articles, and
more pointedly in 'A Walk in a Workhouse' in Reprinted
Pieces, wherein he speaks of the scandal as 'that most in-
famous and atrocious enormity committed at Tooting — an
enormity which, a hundred years hence, will still be vividly
remembered in the bye-ways of English life, and which has
done more to engender a gloomy discontent and suspicion
xii MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
among many thousands of the people than all the Chartist
leaders could have done in all their lives.'
Possibly this was the establishment from which Guster,
Snagsby's servant, originally emerged. Dickens tells us it
was at Tooting, and that she went about in mortal fear of
being sent back there.
The only article in The Examiner referred to by Forster
that we have been unable to trace is the notice of Hood's 'Up
the Rhine,' which Dickens had alluded to privately as 'rather
poor, but I have not said so, because Hood is too, and ill
besides.' Probably it did not appear in print for these
reasons.
The novelist's political squibs and other verses, contributed
to Forster's paper, find a place in the section devoted to
Poems.
Dickens's own paper Household Words contained numer-
ous contributions from his own pen, and in 1858 he collected
and published some of them under the title of Reprinted
Pieces. It cannot reasonably be supposed, however, that he
considered those he selected as alone worthy of preservation,
or of his genius. It was more likely that he was content to
gather together just sufficient material to fill a volume. Or
on the other hand, it may be reasonably inferred that most
of those now discovered for the first time, dealing as they
do with the political and social matters of the day, were not
thought by the novelist to be suitable for inclusion in the
collected works of one whose fame rested upon his works of
fiction. But they are valuable to-day not only as definitely
indicating his political opinions, but as a vital contribution
showing how anxious he always was to help towards the
reformation of what he thought the political and social
wrongs of his day.
As is well known, all contributions to his paper were anony-
INTRODUCTION xiii
mous ; hence the difficulty of discovering his or any one else's
work. This has not, however, debarred many from making
the attempt, the most notable effort being made at the time
when Frederic G. Kitton and Charles Dickens the younger
read through the volumes of the periodical with that object
in view. But the fact that Dickens so thoroughly 'edited'
all the articles and often rewrote many, and the knowledge
that his 'brilliant young men,' as his staff was called, soon
fell in with, and emulated their 'chiefs' style, made that
means of identification not only very troublesome, but prac-
tically impossible of success. In any case the outcome of
all this research, fruitful as it was in some particulars, left
many of his minor writings hidden away in the pages of his
journal, whilst in several instances it was the means of
attributing to Dickens the work of other pens. These we
note hereafter.
There is now no longer any doubt existing concerning the
identity of Dickens's own work (or the work of any con-
tributor to his paper, for the matter of that), and his con-
tributions are here reprinted for the first time on the following
authority.
Like all well-conducted periodicals, Household Words pos-
sessed what is known as a 'Contributors' Book,' wherein were
tabulated in manuscript, the titles of all articles, the names
of their writers, the length, the price paid for same, and
other particulars, under the date of each weekly issue. This
book exists to-day in the possession of Mr. R. C. Lehmann,
M.P., who very courteously placed it at the disposal of the
present writer, in order, as he put it, 'to help carry out the
"National" undertaking in hand of making a complete edi-
tion of the works of England's national novelist.' To Mr.
Lehmann the publishers here wish to place on record an ex-
pression of their deep obligation and gratitude.
XIV
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
After careful examination, the identity of some eighty or
so hitherto unknown writings of Dickens is revealed to the
reading world, and henceforth these will form part of his
acknowledged works.
In order that no doubt may exist as to the genuineness of
this book we quote the certificate of its authenticity which is
pasted in the front cover, and append a photographic repro-
duction of one of its pages.
'WESTBROOK HALL
'Itt Feby., 1903. HORSHAM,
SURREY.'
'This book belonged to Mr. Wills and was left to me by his
widow, my Aunt Janet.
'I now present it to my nephew Rudolph Lehmann as a
memento of Mr. and Mrs. Wills, who loved him as a child.
(Signed) 'ELIZA PRIESTLEY.'
INTRODUCTION xv
As we have noted above, some of these contributions have
been identified before by Frederic G. Kitton and other bibliog-
raphers, and were published in the volume To be Read at
Dusk already referred to. This volume, however, contained
an article entitled 'By Rail to Parnassus' as being from the
pen of Dickens ; but the 'Contributors' Book' shows it to
have been written by Henry Morley. There is also another,
'Rochester and Chatham,' which is an excerpt from 'One
Man in a Dockyard,' written by Dickens and R. H. Home.
This of course may be a 'good shot,' but is not authoritative.
Other articles have also been attributed to Dickens by
bibliographers which were not written by him, and we ap-
pend here the titles of them with the rightful authors' names
attached.
'Foreign Portraits of Englishmen,' by W. H. Wills
and E. Murray (September 21, 1850).
'Household Words and English Wills,' by W. H.
Wills (November 16, 1850).
'Epsom,' by W. H. Wills (June 7, 1851).
'Douglas Jerrold,' by Wilkie Collins (February 5,
1859).
It was not an uncommon occurrence after Dickens's death to
pick out articles and sketches from his famous paper which
read like his work, and reprint them with his name as author.
We can recall two American instances of this. Both 'A
Suburban Romance'' (W. H. Wills), and 'Lizzie Leigh'
(Mrs. Gaskell's famous story), found places in literary an-
nuals of the Keepsake pattern, and were ascribed to Dickens,
whose name at the time was of course a one to conjure with.
There is also a similar case in this country in 'A Curious
Dance round a Curious Tree,' an article relating to St.
Luke's Lunatic Asylum and written by W. H. Wills and
Dickens, which has been frequently reprinted in pamphlet
xvi MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
form by that institution. This has been generally accepted
by bibliographers as written by Dickens, although it appears
in Old Leaves gathered from 'Household Words,' by W. H.
Wills, published in 1860, wherein it is acknowledged as one
of those articles which owed much to the collaboration of
Dickens, 'whose masterly touches gave to the Old Leaves
. . . their brightest tints.'
Throughout the pages of his paper Dickens contributed
many articles in collaboration with various authors in this
way, and these would easily fill more volumes if reprinted.
But we have only preserved those written entirely by Dickens
himself.
There is a curious point, however, in regard to one of these.
In Reprinted Pieces there is a chapter entitled 'A Plated
Article,' and as the contents of the volume were collected
during Dickens's lifetime, there cannot be any doubt that
he considered the article was his. Yet we find in the 'Con-
tributors' Book' that it was by 'C. D. and W. H. W. (W. H.
Wills), and Wills evidently took some credit to himself for
it, as he included it in his volume of Old Leaves with his usual
acknowledgment to his Editor's assistance. The question as
to who was the rightful author of it cannot, under the cir-
cumstances, be decided at this late date.
These facts having been recorded, it is only necessary to
state in regard to the Household Words section of these vol-
umes, that the material has been arranged in chronological
order, except in certain cases where articles forming a series,
appeared at intervals. 7i those cases they have been allowed
to follow each other in proper sequence, ana comprise 'The
Amusements o:" the People,' the sketches dealing with 'Mr.
Bull' and 'Mr. Booley,' and the series of articles entitled
'From the Raven in the Happy Family.' The first chapter
of the latter was called 'A Perfect Felicity in a Bird's Eye
INTRODUCTION xvii
View,' whilst 'The • Good Hippopotamus,' added later, was
also of the series.
There were two other features in the periodical, consisting
of paragraphs of varying length by various writers, grouped
under the general subject headings of 'Supposing' and
'Chips.' Those written by Dickens have been arranged to-
gether under these general headings, and placed at the end
of the section.
Dickens's contributions to All the Year Round are here
included on the authority of Frederic G. Kitton, who identi-
fied them by means of the 'office' set of that periodical, in
which each article had appended the name of the author,
written by a member of the staff. As in the case of House-
hold Words, only the articles wholly written by Dickens have
been included.
Of the six Plays in these volumes, it should be noted that
'Mr. Nightingale's Diary' was written by Charles Dickens
and Mark Lemon, and 'No Thoroughfare' by Charles Dick-
ens and Wilkie Collins. They are included here, as being
inseparably connected with Dickens's fame both as a writer
and as an actor. Indeed, no collection of his works could
be said to be complete without them. 'The Lamplighter' is
printed from the manuscript in the Forster collection in the
Victoria and Albert Museum.
In 1903 the Poems of Dickens, scattered throughout news-
papers, periodicals, and his novels, were collected and pub-
lished in a small volume with bibliographical notes by Fred-
eric G. Kitton. The text and arrangement of this little
volume have been followed in the present instance, with the
exception of the songs, etc., from 'The Village Coquettes'
and 'The Lamplighter,' which, of course, will be found in
their proper places in these volumes. The publishers have
deemed it wise to retain Mr. Kitten's valuable bibliographical
xviii MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
notes. Three poems have been added, two of which were dis-
covered in Household Words, entitled 'Hiram Power's Greek
Slave' and 'Aspire!'; whilst the third, 'The Blacksmith,' ap-
peared in All the Year Round, and is identified by means of
Forster's Life of the novelist, as explained in the biblio-
graphical note.
B. W. MATZ.
CONTENTS
MISCELLANIES FROM ' THE EXAMINER '
1838-1849
PAGB
The Restoration of Shakespeare's 'Lear' to the Stage . 1
Scott and his Publishers — i 6
ii y.i M 20
International Copyright 23
Macready as 'Benedick' 25
Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into
the Condition of the Persons variously engaged in
the University of Oxford 29
Ignorance and Crime 34
The Chinese Junk .".»„.' 37
Cruikshank's 'The Drunkard's Children' 41
The Niger Expedition . 45
The Poetry of Science 64
The American Panorama 68
Judicial Special Pleading . ft** * ^
Edinburgh Apprentice School Association .... 76
Leech's 'The Rising Generation' 78
The Paradise at Tooting 81
xix
xx MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
PAGE
The Tooting Farm .......... 89
The Verdict for Drouet ......... 92
'Virginie' and 'Black-Eyed Susan' ...... 95
An American in Europe • v . '".'-.. ..... 97
Court Ceremonies .......... .107
MISCELLANIES FROM 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS'
1850-1859
Address in the First Number of 'Household Words' . . 113
Announcement in 'Household Words' of the Approach-
ing Publication of 'All the Year Round' . . .115
Address in 'Household Words' ....... 117
The Amusements of the People — i . . . . . .118
Perfect Felicity . . . . . . ... ;. . 132
From the Raven in the Happy Family — i . . .137
n . . . 142
" " " "in ... 147
The 'Good' Hippopotamus ........ 152
Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller . . .158
A Card from Mr. Booley . . . / ..... 170
Mr. Booley's View of the Last Lord Mayor's Show . . 171
Pet Prisoners ... ' ' . "' '. ....... 177
Old Lamps for New Ones . ....... 193
The Sunday Screw .'.'..' ...... 199
CONTEXTS xxi
PAGE
Lively Turtle . . . . ',,;•' I '-.; ;• . . . 208
A Crisis in the Affairs of Mr. John Bull . . &9\'<"- . 215
Mr. Bull's Somnambulist ...-.:. . . . .' . 223
Our Commission . .» .• .'>u;r-':^( •;.'.. . . . 229
Proposals for a National Jest-Book . . . • if/ r>. . 236
A December Vision . . : ; .'". J' . . . 244
The Last Words of the Old Year .... "'.£ "." 7 249
Railway Strikes .' .' .' . l'r."':!'V . . . l}i'1*1'1. 255
Red Tape . . . V . ' :-. ' J ^C? i • J ' . *?01-? 263
The Guild of Literature and Art . ' '? -. ' '. to|A .' ' 4 271
The Finishing Schoolmaster 276
A Few Conventionalities -. 282
A Narrative of Extraordinary Suffering .... 288
Whole Hogs . . r . 295
Sucking Pigs . . . 302
A Sleep to Startle us . 308
Betting-Shops . 317
Trading in Death . ..y . 325
Where we Stopped Growing 337
Proposals for Amusing Posterity 343
Home for Homeless Women . 348
The Spirit Business 365
A Haunted House , . . 373
Gone Astray 380
Frauds on the Fairies 392
xxii MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
PAGE
Things that Cannot be Done 401
Fire and Snow 406
On Strike .' . . 412
The Late Mr. Justice Talfourd 428
It is not Generally Known 430
Legal and Equitable Jokes 438
To Working Men . . . 446
An Unsettled Neighbourhood 450
Reflections of a Lord Mayor 457
The Lost Arctic Voyagers — i . 462
"• " " n . 473
MISCELLANIES
FROM
THE EXAMINER
1838-1849
THE RESTORATION OF SHAKESPEARE'S
'LEAR' TO THE STAGE
[FEBRUARY 4, 1838]
WHAT we ventured to anticipate when Mr. Macready as-
sumed the management of Covent Garden Theatre, has been
every way realised. But the last of his well-directed efforts
to vindicate the higher objects and uses of the drama has
proved the most brilliant and the most successful. He has
restored to the stage Shakespeare's true Lear, banished from
it, by impudent ignorance, for upwards of a hundred and
fifty years.
A person of the name of Boteler has the infamous repute
of having recommended to a notorious poet-laureate, Mr.
Nahum Tate, the 'new modelling' of Lear. 'I found the
whole,' quoth Mr. Tate, addressing the aforesaid Boteler in
his dedication, 'to answer your account of it ; a heap of
jewels unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their dis-
order, that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure.' And
accordingly to work set Nahum very busily indeed: strung
the jewels and polished them with a vengeance; omitted the
grandest things, the Fool among them ; polished all that re-
mained into commonplace ; interlarded love-scenes ; sent
Cordelia, into a comfortable cave with her lover, to dry her
clothes and get warm, while her distracted and homeless old
father was still left wandering without, amid all the pelting
of the pitiless storm ; and finally, rewarded the poor old man
in his turn, and repaid him for all his suffering, by giving
him back again his gilt robes and tinsel sceptre!
Betterton was the last great actor who played Lear before
the commission of this outrage. His performances of it be-
1
2
tween the years 1663 and 1671 are recorded to have been the
greatest efforts of his genius. Ten years after the latter
date, Mr. Tate published his disgusting version, and this was
adopted successively by Boheme, Quin, Booth, Barry, Gar-
rick, Henderson, Kemble, Kean. Mr. Macready has now,
to his lasting honour, restored the text of Shakespeare, and
we shall be glad to hear of the actor foolhardy enough to
attempt another restoration of the text of Mr. Tate ! Mr.
Macready's success has banished that disgrace from the stage
for ever.
The Fool in the tragedy of Lear is one of the most won-
derful creations of Shakespeare's genius. The picture of
his quick and pregnant sarcasm, of his loving devotion, of
his acute sensibility, of his despairing mirth, of his heart-
broken silence — contrasted with the rigid sublimity of Lear's
suffering, with the huge desolation of Lear's sorrow, with the
vast and outraged image of Lear's madness — is the noblest
thought that ever entered into the heart and mind of man.
Nor is it a noble thought alone. Three crowded houses in
Covent Garden Theatre have now proved by something bet-
ter than even the deepest attention that it is for action, for
representation ; that it is necessary to an audience as tears
are to an overcharged heart ; and necessary to Lear himself
as the recollections of his kingdom, or as the worn and faded
garments of his power. We predicted some years since that
this would be felt, and we have the better right to repeat it
now. We take leave again to say that Shakespeare would
have as soon consented to the banishment of Lear from the
tragedy as to the banishment of his Fool. We may fancy
him, while planning his immortal work, feeling suddenly, with
an instinct of divinest genius, that its gigantic sorrows could
never be presented on the stage without a suffering too
frightful, a sublimity too remote, a grandeur too terrible —
unless relieved by quiet pathos, and in some way brought
home to the apprehensions of the audience by homely and
familiar illustration. At such a moment that Fool rose to
his mind, and not till then could he have contemplated his
marvellous work in the greatness and beauty of its final
completion.
RESTORATION OF 'LEAR' 3
The Fool in Lear is the solitary instance of such a char-
acter, in all the writings of Shakespeare, being identified with
the pathos and passion of the scene. He is interwoven with
Lear, he is the link that still associates him with Cordelia's
love, and the presence of the regal estate he has surrendered.
The rage of the wolf Goneril is first stirred by a report that
her favourite gentleman had been struck by her father 'for
chiding of his fool,' — and the first impatient questions we
hear from the dethroned old man are : 'Where 's my knave
• — my fool? Go you and call my fool hither.' — 'Where's
my fool? Ho! I think the world's asleep.' — 'But where 's
my fool? I have not seen him these two days.' — 'Go you
and call hither my fool,' — all which prepare us for that
affecting answer stammered forth at last by the knight in
attendance: 'Since my young lady's going into France, sir,
the fool hath much pined away.' Mr. Macready's manner
of turning off at this with an expression of half impatience,
half ill-repressed emotion — 'No more of that, I have noted it
weir — was inexpressibly touching. We saw him, in the se-
cret corner of his heart, still clinging to the memory of her
who was used to be his best object, the argument of his
praise, balm of his age, 'most best, most dearest.' And in
the same noble and affecting spirit was his manner of fon-
dling the Fool when he sees him first, and asks him with
earnest care, 'How now, my pretty knave? How dost thouf
Can there be a doubt, after this, that his love for the Fool
is associated with Cordelia, who had been kind to the poor
boy, and for the loss of whom he pines away? And are we
not even then prepared for the sublime pathos of the close,
when Lear, bending over the dead body of all he had left to
love upon the earth, connects with her the memory of that
other gentle, faithful, and loving being who had passed from
his side — unites, in that moment of final agony, the two hearts
that had been broken in his service, and exclaims, 'And my
poor fool is hanged !'
Mr. Macready's Lear, remarkable before for a masterly
completeness of conception, is heightened by this introduction
of the Fool to a surprising degree. It accords exactly with
the view he seeks to present of Lear's character. The pas-
4 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
sages we have named, for instance, had even received illustra-
tion in the first scene, where something beyond the turbulent
greatness or royal impatience of Lear had been presented —
something to redeem him from his treatment of Cordelia.
The bewildered pause after giving his 'father's heart' away
— the hurry yet hesitation of his manner as he orders France
to be called — 'Who stirs? Call Burgundy' — had told us at
once how much consideration he needed, how much pity, of
how little of himself he was indeed the master, how crushing
and irrepressible was the strength of his sharp impatience.
We saw no material change in his style of playing the first
great scene with Goneril, which fills the stage with true and
appalling touches of nature. In that scene he ascends in-
deed with the heights of Lear's passion ; through all its
changes of agony, of anger, of impatience, of turbulent
assertion, of despair, and mighty grief, till on his knees, with
arms upraised and head thrown back, the tremendous Curse
bursts from him amid heaving and reluctant throes of suf-
fering and anguish. The great scene of the second act had
also its great passages of power and beauty: his self-per-
suading utterance of 'hysterias passio' — his anxious and
fearful tenderness to Regan — the elevated grandeur of his
appeal to the heavens — his terrible suppressed efforts, his
pauses, his reluctant pangs of passion, in the speech 'I will
not trouble thee, my child,' — and surpassing the whole, as
we think, in deep simplicity as well as agony of pathos, that
noble conception of shame as he hides his face on the arm of
Goneril and says —
'I'll go with thee;
Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,
And thou art twice her love!'
The Poors presence then enabled him to give an effect, unat-
tempted before, to those little words which close the scene,
when, in the effort of bewildering passion with which he
strives to burst through the phalanx of amazed horrors that
have closed him round, he feels that his intellect is shaking,
and suddenly exclaims, 'O Fool! I shall go mad!' This is
RESTORATION OF 'LEAR' 5
better than hitting the forehead and ranting out a self-
reproach.
But the presence of the Fool in the storm-scene! The
reader must witness this to judge its power and observe the
deep impression with which it affects the audience. Every
resource that the art of the painter and the mechanist can
afford is called in aid of this scene — every illustration is
thrown on it of which the great actor of Lear is capable,
but these are nothing to that simple presence of the Fool!
He has changed his character there. So long as hope ex-
isted he had sought by his hectic merriment and sarcasms
to win Lear back to love and reason, but that half of his
work is now over, and all that remains for him is to soothe
and lessen the certainty of the worst. Kent asks who is with
Lear in the storm, and is answered —
'None but the Fool, who labours to outjest
His heart-struck injuries!'
When all his attempts have failed, either to soothe or to
outjest these injuries, he sings, in the shivering cold, about
the necessity of 'going to bed at noon.' He leaves the stage
to die in his youth, and we hear of him no more till we hear
the sublime touch of pathos over the dead body of the
hanged Cordelia.
The finest passage of Mr. Macready's scenes upon the
heath is his remembrance of the 'poor naked wretches,'
wherein a new world seems indeed to have broken upon his
mind. Other parts of these scenes wanted more of tumultuous
extravagance, more of a preternatural cast of wildness. We
should always be made to feel something beyond physical
distress predominant here. His colloquy with Mad Tom,
however, was touching in the last degree, and so were the
two last scenes, the recognition of Cordelia and the death,
which elicited from the audience the truest and best of all
tributes to their beauty and pathos. Mr. Macready's repre-
sentation of the father at the end, broken down to his last
despairing struggle, his heart swelling gradually upwards
till it bursts in its closing sigh, completed the only perfect
picture that we have had of Lear since the age of Betterton.
6 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
We never saw any tragedy, in so far as we could judge,
affect an audience more deeply than the manner of the whole
management of this tragedy of Lear. It was, indeed, a tri-
umph for the stage, in an assertion of its highest uses.
The performers generally exerted themselves to the utmost.
Mr. Bartley's Kent was every way masterly, and Miss P.
Horton's Fool as exquisite a performance as the stage has
ever boasted. Mr. Elton's Edgar is the best we have seen,
excepting that of Mr. Charles Kemble; Miss Huddart's
Regan contributed much to the general effect; and Mr.
Anderson's Edmund was energetic and graceful. Of the
other resources called in aid with such knowledge, taste, and
care, we cannot do better than speak in the language of an
excellent critic in the John Bull.
[Here follows a somewhat lengthy extract from John BuU
dealing only with the scenery and staging of the piece.]
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS
[MARCH 31, 1839]
WHEN the Refutation, to which this pamphlet * is a reply,
was put forth, we took occasion to examine into the nature
of the charges of misstatement and misrepresentation which
were therein brought against Mr. Lockhart, to point out
how very slight and unimportant they appeared to be, even
upon the refuter's own showing, and to express our opinion
that the refutation originated in the overweening vanity of
the Ballantyne family, who, confounding their own im-
portance with that of the great man who condescended (to
his cost) to patronise them, sought to magnify and exalt
themselves with a degree of presumption and conceit which
leaves the fly on the wheel, the organ bellows-blower, and the
iThe Ballantyne Humbug Handled; in a letter to Sir Adam Fergus-
son. By the Author of Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. Cadell,
Edinburgh; Murray, London.
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 7
aspiring frog of the fable, all at an immeasurable distance
behind.
Much as we may wonder, after an attentive perusal of the
pamphlet before us, how the lad, James Ballantyne's son, can
have been permitted by those who must have known from the
commencement what facts were in reserve, to force on this
exposure of the most culpable negligence and recklessness on
the part of the men who have been paraded as the victims of
erring and ambitious genius, it is impossible to regard the
circumstance in any other light than as a most fortunate
and happy one for the memory of Sir Walter Scott. If ever
engineer were 'hoist with his own petard,' if ever accusa-
tions recoiled upon the heads of those who made them, if
ever the parties in the witness-box and the dock changed
places, it is in this case of the Ballantynes and Sir Walter
Scott. And the proof, be it remembered, is to be found —
not in the unsupported assertions of Mr. Lockhart or his
ingenious reasoning from assumed facts, but in the letters,
accounts, and statements of the Ballantynes themselves.
Premising that Mr. Lockhart, in glancing at the 'unan-
swerable refutation' and 'the overwhelming exposure' notices
of the Ballantyne pamphlet in other journals, might fairly
and justly have noticed this journal l as an exception (in
whose columns more than one head of his reply was antici-
pated long ago), we will proceed to quote — first, Mr. Lock-
hart's statement of his reasons for introducing in the biog-
raphy detailed descriptions of the habits and manners of
the Ballantynes, which we take to have been the head and
front of his offence ; and secondly, such scraps of evidence
bearing upon the allegation that the Ballantynes were ruined
by the improvidence and lavish expenditure of Scott, as we
can afford space for, in a very brief analysis of the whole.
With regard to the first point, Mr. Lockhart writes thus : —
'The most curious problem in the life of Scott could re-
ceive no fair attempt at solution, unless the inquirer were
made acquainted, in as far as the biographer could make
him so, with the nature, and habits, and manners of Scott's
partners and agents. Had the reader been left to take his
i The Examiner.
8 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ideas of those men from the eloquence of epitaphs — to con-
ceive of them as having been capitalists instead of penniless
adventurers — men regularly and fitly trained for the callings
in which they were employed by Scott, in place of being
the one and the other entirely unacquainted with the prime
requisites for success in such callings — men exact and dili-
gent in their proper business, careful and moderate in their
personal expenditure, instead of the reverse ; had such hallu-
cinations been left undisturbed, where was the clue of extrica-
tion from the mysterious labyrinth of Sir Walter's fatal
entanglements in commerce? It was necessary, in truth and
justice, to show — not that he was without blame in the
conduct of his pecuniary affairs — (I surely made no such
ridiculous attempt) — but that he could not have been ruined
by commerce, had his partners been good men of business.
It was necessary to show that he was in the main the victim
of his own blind over-confidence in the management of the
two Ballantynes. In order to show how excessive was the
kindness that prompted such over-confidence, it was necessary
to bring out the follies and foibles, as well as the better
qualities, of the men.'
Does any reasonable and dispassionate man doubt this? Is
there any man who does not know that the titles of a hun-
dred biographies might be jotted down in half an hour, in
each and every of which there shall be found a hundred
personal sketches of a hundred men, a hundred times more
important, clever, excellent, and worthy, than Mr. James
Ballantyne, the Printer of Edinburgh, and whilom of Kelso,
regarding which the world has never heard one syllable of
remonstrance or complaint?
Of Mr. John Ballantyne, the less said the better. If he
•were an honest, upright, honourable man, it is a comfort to
know that there are plentiful store of such characters living
at this moment in the rules of our Debtors' Prison, and pass-
ing through the Insolvent Court by dozens every day. As
an instance of Mr. Lockhart's easy mode of assertion, we
were given to understand in the Refutation that Mr. John
Ballantyne had never been a banker's clerk. Mr. Cadell and
another gentleman bear testimony that he used to say he
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 9
had been (which seems by no means conclusive evidence that
he ever was), and if he were, as Mr. Lockhart tells us he ha»
since learnt, a tailor, or superintendent of the tailoring de-
partment of the father's general shop at Kelso, a previously
unintelligible fragment in one of Scott's letters becomes sus-
ceptible of a very startling and simple solution. 'If it takes
nine tailors to make a man, how many will it take to ruin
one?'
The descendants of Mr. James Ballantyne charge Sir
Walter Scott with having ruined him by his profuse expendi-
ture, and the tremendous responsibilities which he cast upon
the printing concern. Mr. Lockhart charges Mr, James
Ballantyne with having ruined the business by his own neg-
ligence, extravagance, and inattention. Let us see which
of these charges is the best supported by facts.
Scott entered into partnership with James Ballantyne in
May 1805. James Ballantyne's brother John (being then
the bookkeeper) enters the amount of capital which James
had invested in the concern, at £3694, 16s. lid. ; but of these
figures no less than £2090 represents 'stock in trade,' which
it appears from other statements that the same John Ballan-
tyne was in the habit of valuing at most preposterous and
exaggerated sums ; and the balance of £1604, 16s. lid. is
represented by 'book debts' to that amount. Scott came in
as the monied partner — as the man to prop up the concern ;
even then his patrimonial fortune was £10,000 or £12,000 ;
he possessed at the time, independently of all literary exer-
tions, an income of £1000 per annum ; he advanced for the
business £2008, 'including in the said advance the sum of
£500 contained in Mr. Ballantyne's promissory note, dated 1st
February last' — from which it would seem pretty clear that
the affluent Mr. James Ballantyne ran rather short of money
about this time — and £40 more, also advanced to Mr. Ballan-
tyne previous to the execution of the deed. Scott, in con-
sideration of this payment, was to have one-third of the
business, and James Ballantyne two; his extra third being
specially in consideration of his undertaking those duties of
management, for the neglect and omission of which, through-
out tke long correspondence of a long term of years, we find
10 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
him apologising to Scott himself in every variety of hum-
ble, maudlin, abject, and whining prostration.
The very first entry in the very first 'State,' or statement
of the partnership accounts, is a payment on behalf of
James Ballantyne for 'an acceptance at Kelso,' — at Kelso,
observe, in his original obscurity and small way of business
— '£200.' There are advances to his father to the amount
of £270, 19s. 5d., there are his own drafts during the first
year of the partnership to the enormous amount of £2378,
4s. 9d., his share of the profits being only £786, 10s. 3d. ;
Scott's drafts for the same period being £100 and his share
£393, 5s. Id. ! At the expiration of five years and a half,
the injured and oppressed Mr. James Ballantyne had over-
drawn his share of the profits to the amount of £2027, 2s.
5d., while Scott had underdrawn his share by the sum of
£577, 2s. 8d. Now let any man of common practical sense,
from Mr. Rothschild's successor, whoever he may be, down
to the commonest light-porter and warehouseman who can
read and write and cast accounts, say, upon such a state-
ment of figures as this, who was the gainer by the partner-
ship, who may be supposed to have objects and designs of
his own to serve in forming it, and in what pecuniary situa-
tion Mr. James Ballantyne — the needy and embarrassed
printer of Kelso — must have been placed, when Scott first
shed upon him the light of his countenance.
'Scott, in those days,' says Mr. Lockhart, 'had neither
bought land, nor indulged in any private habits likely to
hamper his pecuniary condition. He had a handsome in-
come, nowise derived from commerce. He was already a
highly .popular author, and had received from the book-
sellers copy-monies of then unprecedented magnitude. With
him the only speculation and the only source of embarrass-
ment was this printing concern; and how, had the other
partner conducted himself in reference to it as Scott did,
could it have been any source of embarrassment at all? He
was, I cannot but think, imperfectly acquainted with James
Ballantyne's pecuniary means, as well as with his habits and
tastes, when the firm was set up. He was deeply injured by
his partner's want of skill and care in the conduct of the
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 11
, and not less so by that partner's irreclaimable per-
sonal extravagance ; and he was systematically mystified by the
States, etc., prepared by Mr. John. In fact, every balance-
sheet that has been preserved, or made accessible to me, seems
to be fallacious. They are not of the company's entire
affairs, but of one particular account in their books only —
viz. the expenditure on the printing work done, and the
produce of that work. This delusive system appears to have
continued till the end of 1823, after which date the books
are not even added or "written up.'
In 1809 the bookselling firm started, Scott having one
moiety for his share, and the two brothers the remaining
moiety for theirs. He put down £1000 for his share, and
LENT Mr. James Ballantyne £500 for his ( !), and by the
month of June 1810 he had embarked £9000 in the two con-
cerns. Mr. James Ballantyne, even now, had no capital; he
borrowed capital from Scott to form the bookselling estab-
lishment ; he rendered the system of accommodation bills nec-
essary by so egregiously overdrawing so small a capital as
they started with; and not satisfied with this, he grossly
neglected and mismanaged the business (by his own confes-
sion) during the whole time of its superintendence being
entrusted to him.
In 1815 (the year of Mr. James Ballantyne's marriage)
the bookselling business was abandoned; there were no re-
sources with which to meet its obligations but those of the
printing company, and Scott, in January 1816, writes thus
to him —
'The burthen must be upon you and me — that is, on the
printing office. If you will agree to conduct this business
henceforth with steadiness and care, and to content yourself
with £400 a year from it for your private purposes, its
profits will ultimately set us free. I agree that we should
grant mutual discharges as booksellers, and consider the
whole debt as attaching to you and me as printers. I agree,
farther, that the responsibility of the whole debt should be
assumed by myself alone for the present — provided you, on
your part, never interfere with the printing profits, beyond
your allowance, until the debt has been obliterated, or put
12
into such a train of liquidation that you see your way clear,
and voluntarily reassume your station as my partner, in-
stead of continuing to be, as you now must consider yourself,
merely my steward, book-keeper, and manager in the Canon-
gate.'
Now, could the dullest and most addle-headed man alive be
brought to believe — is it in human nature, in common sense,
or common reason — that if Mr. James Ballantyne had the
smallest ground of just complaint against Scott at this
time, he would have listened to such a proposition? But he
did listen to it, and eagerly embraced it; and in the October
of that very year this same Mr. James Ballantyne, whose
besotted trustees have dragged the circumstance to light from
the concealment in which Mr. Lockhart mercifully left it
— this same Mr. James Ballantyne, the plundered and deluded
victim of Scott, announces to him that, being pressed by a
younger brother at Kelso for a personal debt — not a part-
nership liability — a personal debt of £500, he had paid
away to him a bill of the company, and, but for this bill
being dishonoured by an accidental circumstance, Scott
would, in all human probability, have never heard one word
of the matter down to the day of his death.
Does Mr. James Ballantyne brazen this proceeding out,
and retort upon Scott, 'I have been your tool and instru-
ment. But for you I should have been by this time a man
in affluent circumstances, and well able to pay this money.
You brought me to this pass by your misconduct; it was
your bounden duty to extricate me, and I had a right to
extricate myself by the use of your name for my own pur-
poses, when you have so often used mine for yours'? Judge
from the following extracts from his letters on the subject: —
'It is needless for me to dwell on my deep regret at the
discreditable incident which has taken place. . . . / was not
aware of the terrible consequences arising from one acting
partner's using the copartnery signature for his personal
purposes. I assure you,. Sir, I should very nearly as soon
FORGE your own signature as use one which implicated your
credit and property for what belonged to me personally.'
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 13
And then he goes on in a tone of great humility, endeav-
ouring to excuse himself thus: —
*I respectfully beg leave to call to your recollection a very
long and not very pleasant correspondence two years ago,
on the subject of the debts due to my brother Alexander,
and I may now shortly re-state, that the money advanced by
him went into the funds of the business, and at periods when
it was imperiously wanted. No doubt it went in my name,
to help up my share of stock equal to yours; but I honestly
confess to you, that this consideration never went into my
calculation, and that when I agreed that the name of James
B. and Co. should be given to the bills for that money, I
had no other idea than that it was an easy mode of procur-
ing money, at a very serious crisis, when money was greatly
wanted ; nor did I see that I should refuse it because the lender
was my brother. His cash was as good as another's. Per-
sonally, I never received a sixpence of it.'
Personally he never received a sixpence of it! Oh, cer-
tainly not. That is to say, Mr. James Ballantyne paid the
money to the partnership banking account towards his share
of the joint capital, and immediately set about drawing pri-
vate cheques as fast as he could draw for three times the sum.
In 1821 Mr. John Ballantyne died, and Mr. James Ballan-
tyne, petitioning Scott that a termination might be put to
his stewardship, and that he might be admitted to a new
share in the business, he becomes, under a deed bearing date
on the 1st of April 1822 (the missive letter, in Scott's hand-
writing, laying down the heads of which, is given by Mr.
Lockhart at length), once more a partner in the business.
The circumstances under which his stewardship had been
undertaken — and this request for a new partnership was
conceded by Scott — are thus stated by Mr. Lockhart; and
the statement is, in every respect in which we have been able
to examine it, borne out by facts : —
'For the preparation of the formal contract of 1822, Sir
Walter selected Mrs. James Ballantyne's brother. We have
seen that this Mr. George Hogarth, a man of business, a
Writer to the Signet, a gentleman whose ability and intelli-
14
gence no one can dispute, was privy to all the transactions
between Scott and James, whereupon the matrimonial nego-
tiation proceeded to its close; — and that Mr. Hogarth ap-
proved of, and Mr. Ballantyne expressed deep gratitude
for, the arrangements then dictated by Sir Walter Scott.
Must not these Trustees themselves, when confronted with
the evidence now given, admit that these arrangements were
most liberal and generous? Scott, "the business being in
difficulties," takes the whole of these difficulties upon him-
self. He assumes, for a prospective series of five or six
years, the whole responsibility of its debts and its expendi-
ture, including a liberal salary to James as manager. In
order to provide him with the means of paying a personal
debt of £3000 due to himself — and wholly distinct fr»m
copartnery debts — Scott agrees to secure for him a certain
part of the proceeds of every novel that shall be written
during the continuance of this arrangement. With the pub-
lishing of these novels James was to have no trouble — there
was no risk about them — the gain on each was clear and
certain, — and of every sum thus produced by the exertion
of Scott's genius and industry, James Ballantyne was to
have a sixth, as a mere bonus to help him in paying off his
debt of £8000, upon which debt, moreover, no interest was
to be charged. In what respect did this differ from draw-
ing the pen, every five or six months, through a very con-
siderable portion of the debt? Scott was undertaking
neither more nor less than to take the money out of his own
pocket, and pay it regularly into James's, who had no more
risk or trouble in the publication of those immortal works
than any printer in Westminster. The Pamphleteers must
admit that James, pending this arrangement, was not the
partner, but literally the paid servant of his benefactor, and
that while "the total responsibility of the debts and expendi-
ture of the business" lay on Scott, Scott had the perfect
right to make any use he pleased of its profits and credit.
They must admit, that after the arrangement had continued
for five years, James examined the state of the concern, and
petitioned Scott to replace him as a partner ; that so far from
finding any reason to complain of what Scott had done with
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 15
the business while it was solely his, without one word of
complaint as to this large amount of floating bills so boldly
averred in the Pamphlet to have been drawn for Scott's per-
sonal accommodation, James, in praying for readmission,
acknowledged that down to the close of the period (June
1821) he had grossly neglected the most important parts
of the business whereof he had had charge as Scott's
stipendiary servant; — acknowledged, that notwithstanding
his salary as manager of the printing-office, another salary
of £200 a year as editor of a newspaper, and the large sums
he derived from novel-copyrights given to him ex mera
gratia — he had so misconducted his own private aifairs, that
having begun his stewardship as debtor to Scott for £3000,
he, when he wished the stewardship to terminate, owed Scott
much more than £3000 ; but that, acknowledging all this,
he made at the same time such solemn promises of amend-
ment for the future, that Scott consented to do as he
prayed; only stipulating, that until the whole affairs of the
printing business should be reduced to perfect order, debts
discharged, its stock and disposable funds increased, each
partner should limit himself to drawing £500 per annum for
his personal use. They must admit that James made all these
acknowledgments and promises ; that Scott accepted them
graciously; and that the moment before the final copartner-
ship was signed, James Ballantyne was Sir Walter Scott's
debtor, entirely at his mercy ; that down to that moment, by
James's own clear confession, Scott, as connected with this
printing establishment, had been sinned against, not sinning.
'The contract prepared and written by Mr. Hogarth was
signed on the 1st of April 1822. It bears express reference
to the "missive letter dated the 15th and 22nd of June last,"
by which the parties had "concluded an agreement for the
settlement of the accounts and transactions subsisting be-
tween them, and also for the terms of the said new copart-
nery, and agreed to execute a regular deed in implement of
said agreement" ; and "therefore and for the reasons more
particularly specified in the said missive letters, which are
here specially referred to, and held as repeated, they have
agreed, and hereby agree, to the following articles." Then
16 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
follow the articles of agreement, embodying the substance of
the missive. Scott is to draw the whole profits of the busi-
ness prior to Whitsunday 1822, in respect of the responsi-
bility he had undertaken. Ballantyne acknowledges a per-
sonal debt of £1800 as at Whitsunday 1821, which was to
be paid out of the funds specified in the missives, no interest
being due until after Whitsunday 1822. Sir Walter having
advanced £2575 for buildings in the Canongate, new types,
etc., James is to grant a bond for the half of that sum. It
further appears by the only cashbook exhibited to me, that
James, notwithstanding his frugal mode of living, had
quietly drawn £1629 more than his allowance between 1816
and 1822, but of this, as it is stated, as a balance of cash,
due by James at Whitsunday 1822, Scott could not have
been aware when with his own hand he wrote the missive
letter. Sir Walter, I have said, was to be liable for all the
debts contracted between 1816 and 1822, but to have the
exclusive right of property in all the current funds, to ena-
ble him to pay off these debts, and as the deed bears, "to
indemnify him for his advances on account of the copart-
nery" — i. e.t from 1816 to 1822. Finally, JAMES BECOMES
BOUND TO KEEP REGULAR AND DISTINCT BOOKS, WHICH ARE
TO BE BALANCED ANNUALLY. Now, on looking at the im-
port of this legal instrument, as well as the missive which
it corroborated, and the prior communications between the
parties, whom would an unbiassed reader suppose to have been
the partner most benefited by this concern in time past, —
whom to be the person most likely to have trespassed upon
its credit, and embarrassed its resources?'
How did Mr. James Ballantyne perform his part of this
contract? From January 1822 to May 1826, when the
affairs were wound up, he was entitled to have drawn in all
about £1750. He drew in all £7581, 15s. 5d. Of whose
money? Assuredly not his own.
For Mr. Lockhart's explanation of the Vidimus, and of
the refuter's construction and distortion of certain impor-
tant items which go a long way towards accounting for the
great increase in the accommodation bills, and show how
improperly, and with what an appearance of wilful error,
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 17
certain receipts and charges have been fixed upon Scott,
which might with as much justice have been fixed upon the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Bank of Scotland, we
must refer our readers to the pamphlet itself, and merely
state these general results: That in 1823, the accommoda-
tions of James Ballantyne and Co. amounted to £36,000 ;
that there is no shadow or scrap of evidence to show that any
of these accommodation bills had been issued for Scott's pri-
vate purposes ; that it is made a matter of charge in the
Refutation pamphlet that in 1826 they had increased to
£46,000; that we now find that of this additional £10,000
Mr. James Ballantyne himself pocketed (calculating inter-
est) more than £8000, and that all the expenses of stamps
and renewals have to be charged against the remaining
£2000 ; finally, that Scott, who is asserted to have ruined
these Ballantynes by his ambition to become a landed pro-
prietor, invested in all, up to June 1821, £29,083 in the
purchase of land, having received since 1811 an official in-
come of £1600 per annum, and gained, as an author,
£80,000. Let any plain, unprejudiced man, who has learnt
that two and two make four, and who has moved in the
world in the ordinary pursuits of life, put these facts to-
gether, read this correspondence with acknowledgments of
error and misconduct on the part of the Messrs. Ballantyne
repeated from day to day and urged from year to year —
let him examine these transactions, and find that in every one
which is capable of explanation now the parties are in their
graves, the extravagance, thoughtlessness, recklessness, and
wrong have been upon the part of these pigmies, and the
truest magnanimity and forbearance on the side of the giant
who upheld them, and under the shadow of whose protection
they gradually came to lose sight of their own stature, and
to imagine themselves as great as he — let any man divest
himself of that lurking desire to carp and cavil over the
actions of men who have raised themselves high above their
fellows, which unhappily seems inherent in human nature,
and bring to this subject but the calmest and most plodding
consideration of facts and probabilities — and say whether
it is possible to arrive at any conclusion but that Messrs,
18 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Ballantyne and the Messrs. Ballantyne's descendants owe a
deep and lasting debt of gratitude to Sir Walter Scott as the
originator of all the name, fame, and fortune they may
possess, or to which they can ever aspire — and that this
attempt to blacken the memory of the dead benefactor of
their house would be an act of the basest and most despicable
ingratitude, were it not one of the most puling and drivelling
folly.
That Mr. James Ballantyne did not know at what time
Abbotsford had ceased to stand 'between him and ruin,' —
that he did not know, and well know, that Sir Walter Scott
had made the settlement of it which he did upon his son's
marriage, is next to impossible. All Edinburgh rung with
it for Bays; the topic was canvassed in every bookseller's
shop and discussed at every street corner; gossips carried it
from door to door; advocates discoursed upon it in loqua-
cious groups in the outer house ; and the very boys at the
High School bandied it from mouth to mouth. To Profes-
sor Wilson, Mr. Sheriff Cay, Mr. Peter Robertson, all the
known men and women of Edinburgh, and all the unknown
men and women also, it was notorious as the existence of
Arthur's Seat or Holyrood. Is it to be believed that Mr.
James Ballantyne alone, shut up in his printing-office in
solitary admiration of his old critiques on Mrs. Siddons or
his improvements in Scott's romances, was in ignorance of
the fact while it resounded through the city from end to end,
or that he could have remained so for the space of nine long
months? The insinuations put forth by the trustees and son
of the late Mr. James Ballantyne respecting his marriage,
and his throwing his wife's portion into the partnership fund
at Scott's command, are no less monstrous. How stands
this fact? Why, that but for Scott's kindness and goodness
he never could have contracted it. — 'I fear I am in debt for
more than all I possess — to a lenient creditor, no doubt; but
still the debt exists.' — *I am de jure et de facto, wholly de-
pendent on you.' — 'All, and more than all, belonging osten-
sibly to me, is, I presume, yours.' — 'God be praised that,
after all your cruel vexations, you know the extent of your
lo$t. It hag been great, but few men have such resources.'
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 19
Such are the terms in which Mr. James Ballantyne addresses
his 'dear friend and benefactor' when, being deep in love as
well as in debt, he solicits that aid from his lenient creditor,
which, after all the cruel loss and vexation, the latter did not
withhold.
Ruin ! ruin brought upon the Ballantynes by Scott — by
Scott, who aided and assisted them at every turn, from the
first hour when he found Mr. James Ballantyne, a poor and
struggling tradesman in a small Scotch town, down to those
later days when the same patronage and notice enabled him
to affect criticism and taste, Shakespeare and the Musical
Glasses, and to get a good business — which would have been
a better one if he had minded it — and to leave it to this very
son, who is made to talk about his father having cast his
bread upon the waters, and so forth, in a style not unworthy
of Mr. James Ballantyne's own extravagant solemnity !
Ruin! Where are the signs and tokens of this ruin? Are
they discernible in the position of Mr. James Ballantyne at
any one time after he had fluttered, butterfly-like, into Edin-
burgh notoriety through the influence of Scott, but for whom
he would have lived and died a grub at Kelso? Are they
manifest in the present condition of his son, who has acquired
and inherited an honourable trade which he will do well to
stick to, disregarding the promptings of weak and foolish
friends? Good God! How much of the profits of the last
edition of the Waverley Novels has gone to the schooling,
apprenticing, boarding, lodging, washing, clothing, and feed-
ing of this very young man, and in how different a manner
would he have been schooled, apprenticed, boarded, lodged,
washed, clothed, and fed, without them !
There is nothing in the whole of these transactions, which,
to our mind, casts the smallest doubt or suspicion upon Sir
Walter Scott, save in one single particular. His repeated
forgiveness of his careless partners, and his constant and
familiar association with persons so much beneath a man of
his transcendent abilities and elevated station, lead us to fear
that he turned a readier ear than became him to a little knot
of toad-eaters and flatterers.
20 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
II
[SEPTEMBER 29, 1839]
IT is not our intention to administer to the diseased craving
after notoriety so conspicuous in 'the trustees and son of
the late Mr. James Ballantyne,' by noticing this pamphlet *
of theirs at any length, or entering into a minute examina-
tion of its details. Its general character may be described
in a very few words.
From first to last there is visible throughout it, the same
want of understanding of their own position, the same con-
founding of Mr. James Ballantyne with Sir Walter Scott,
the same preposterous and inflated notions that the Ballan-
tynes are great public characters, the same stilted imitation
of the man who played the cock to Garrick's Hamlet, which
these gentlemen have before displayed, and upon which we
have already had occasion to observe. The major part of
the contradictions which are given to Mr. Lockhart are
founded upon partial statements of documents to which the
contradicting parties only have access, and which may very
possibly be susceptible of different or wider construction ;
other contradictions are based upon mere inferences and as-
sumptions, than which none of Mr. Lockhart's are less prob-
able, while many are more so ; on other points loose denials
are hazarded, or pretended indifference shown, when there are,
both living and accessible, parties whose evidence might be
of great importance, and who — carefully sought out and
canvassed when they have a word to say or write which will
tell in favour of the pamphleteers — are kept most scrupu-
lously at a distance when their testimony might prove un-
favorable.
It still remains, untouched and unquestioned by any of the
lengthy and grandiloquent statements of this bulky pam-
i Reply to Mr. Lockhart's Pamphlet, entitled 'The Ballantyne Hum-
bug Handled.' By the authors of a 'Refutation of the Misstatements
and Calumnies contained in Mr. Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott,
Bart., respecting the Messrs. Ballantyne.' Longman and Co.
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS 21
phlet, a clear and indisputable fact that Sir Walter Scott
was the architect of the Ballantyne fortunes ; that he raised
Messrs. James and John from obscurity, brought them into
notice and established for them good connexions ; and finally,
that Mr. James did at last and after all his alleged misfor-
tunes leave to his son, for a sufficient support and mainte-
nance, that creditable business to which he has succeeded, and
which was founded and altogether made by Sir Walter Scott.
He left to his children beside what this very lofty and aspir-
ing young gentleman, the son of Mr. James aforesaid, calls
'an inheritance of four or five thousand pounds,' and which
we — taking into consideration that Mr. James had always
lived pretty gaily and close upon his means — would humbly
suggest was rather more than they might have expected, and
quite enough to have made all his sons, heirs, trustees, and
descendants, contented and grateful.
We should not have bestowed so many words upon this
'reply' but for certain documents which appear in the ap-
pendix ; and we have sufficient faith in the manly feeling of
the deceased Mr. James Ballantyne — who, notwithstanding
his solemn conceit and very laughable exaggeration of his
intellectual and social position, seems to have been on the
whole an estimable person — we place credit enough in his
love and reverence for Sir Walter Scott, in his gratitude
and esteem for that true benefactor and most condescending
friend, to believe he would rather have submitted to be burnt
alive than have his name disgraced, and every feeling of hon-
ourable confidence violated, by their publication.
In this appendix there are set forth — wholly unconnected
with the text of the reply — not referred to — not called for
in any way — the following, among other letters from Sir
Walter Scott to Mr. James Ballantyne ; printed and pub-
lished now, to show Mr. James Ballantyne the printer as the
great patron of Sir Walter Scott the author, the dispenser
to him and his family of bread and cheese and clothing while
he worked at his death !
22 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
DEAR SIR, — Please to settle the enclosed accompt, Falkner
and Co., for £94 odds, and place the same to my debit in ac-
compt.— Your obedient Servant, WALTER SCOTT.
EDINBURGH, 29th June.
Mr. JAMES BALLANTTYXE, PRINTER,
Edinburgh, Canongate.
DEAR JAMES, — I will be obliged to you for twenty-four pounds
sterling, being for a fortnight's support for my family. — Yours
truly, WALTER SCOTT.
CASTLE STREET, 23rd January.
Mr. JAMES BALLANTYNE.
October 15, 1820.
SIR, — You will find beneath an order on Mr. James Ballantyne
to settle your account by payment or acceptance, which will be
the same as if I did so myself. I could wish to be furnished
with these bills before they exceed £50, for your convenience as
well as mine. — I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant,
WALTER SCOTT.
ABBOTSFORD, 13th October.
Mr. BLACK WOOD, etc.
SIR, — Be pleased to settle with Messrs. Blackwood, mercers,
etc., Edinburgh, an accompt due by my family to them, amount-
ing in sum to £218 sterling, and this by payment, or a bill at
short date, as most convenient, and place the amount to my debit
in accompting. — I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant,
WALTER SCOTT.
ABBOTSFORD, 13th October 1820.
If Mr. Thompson will take the trouble to call on Mr. James
Ballantyne, printer, Paul's Work, Canongate, and show Mr. Bal-
lantyne this note, he will receive payment of his accompt of
thirty-three pounds odds, for hay and corn due by Sir Walter
Scott. WALTER SCOTT.
CASTLE STREET, 8th July.
July 13, 1825.
Lady Scott, with best compliments to Mr. Ballantyne, takes the
liberty of enclosing him two of Miss Scott's bills, which have
been omitted being added with her own, and might occasion
some difficulty in the settling of them, as Misses Jollie and
Brown are giving up business. Lady Scott has many apologies
to make for giving all this trouble, and having also to request
that, when he is so obliging to settle her account with Mr. Pringle
the butcher, that he would also settle her last account with him,
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT 23
that she may be quite clear with him. Lady Scott thinks that
her second account will amount nearly to £40.
CASTLE STREET, Saturday morning.
Now, we ask all those who have been cheered and delighted
by the labours of this great man, who have hearts to feel or
heads to understand his works, and in whose mouths the cre-
ations of his brain are familiar as household words — we ask
all those who, in the ordinary transactions of common life,
have respect for delicacy and honour, — What sympathy are
they prepared to show to the trustees and son of the late Mr.
James Ballantyne, who, unable sufficiently to revenge their
quarrel with Mr. Lockhart upon Mr. Lockhart himself, pre-
sume to turn upon the subjects of his biography, and seek a
retaliation in means so pitiful and disgusting as these ?
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT '
[JULY 16, 1842]
You may perhaps be aware that during my stay in America
I lost no opportunity of endeavouring to awaken the public
mind to a sense of the unjust and iniquitous state of the law
in that country, in reference to the wholesale piracy of
British works.
Having been successful in making the subject one of gen-
eral discussion in the United States, I carried to Washing-
ton, for presentation to Congress by Mr. Clay, a petition
from the whole body of American authors, earnestly praying
for the enactment of an international copyright law. It was
signed by Mr. Washington Irving, Mr. Prescott, Mr.
Cooper, and every man who has distinguished himself in the
literature of America ; and has since been referred to a select
committee of the House of Representatives.
To counteract any effect which might be produced by
that petition, a meeting was held in Boston — which, you will
remember, is the seat and stronghold of learning in the
i Appeared also in the A thenceum and other papers.
24 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
United States — at which a memorial against any change in
the existing state of things in this respect was agreed to,
with but one dissentient voice. This document, which, in-
credible as it may appear to you, was actually forwarded to
Congress, and received, deliberately stated that if English
authors were invested with any control over the republication
of their own books, it would be no longer possible for Amer-
ican editors to alter and adapt them (as they do now) to
the American taste !
This memorial was, without loss of time, replied to by Mr.
Prescott, who commented, with the natural indignation of a
gentleman and a man of letters, upon its extraordinary dis-
honesty. I am satisfied that this brief mention of its tone
and spirit is sufficient to impress you with the conviction,
that it becomes all those who are in any way connected with
the literature of England to take that high stand to which
the nature of their pursuits and the extent of their sphere and
usefulness justly entitle them ; to discourage the upholders of
such doctrines by every means in their power, and to hold
themselves aloof from the remotest participation in a system,
from which the moral sense and honourable feeling of all
just men must instinctively recoil.
For myself, I have resolved that I will never from this time
enter into any negotiation with any person for the trans-
mission, across the Atlantic, of early proofs of anything I
may write, and that I will forego all profit derivable from
such a source. I do not venture to urge this line of pro-
ceeding upon you, but I would beg to suggest, and to lay
great stress upon the necessity of observing, one other course
of action, to which I cannot too emphatically call your at-
tention.
The persons who exert themselves to mislead the American
public on this question, to put down its discussion, and to
suppress and distort the truth in reference to it in every
possible way, are (as you may easily suppose) those who
have a strong interest in the existing system of piracy and
plunder; inasmuch as, so long as it continues, they can gain
a very comfortable living out of the brains of other men,
while they would find it very difficult to earn bread by the
MACREADY AS 'BENEDICT' 25
exercise of their own. These are the editors and proprietors
of newspapers almost exclusively devoted to the republication
of popular English works. They are, for the most part, men
of very low attainments, and of more than indifferent repu-
tation ; and I have frequently seen them, in the same sheet in
which they boast of the rapid sale of many thousand copies
of an English reprint, coarsely and insolently attacking the
author of that very book, and heaping scurrility and slander
upon his head.
I would therefore entreat you, in the name of the honour-
able pursuit with which you are so intimately connected,
never to hold correspondence with any of these men, and never
to negotiate with them for the sale of early proofs of any
work over which you have control; but to treat, on all occa-
sions, with some respectable American publishing house, and
with such an establishment only.
Our common interest in this subject, and my advocacy of
it, single-handed, on every occasion that has presented itself
during my absence from Europe, form my excuse for ad-
dressing you.
And I am, faithfully yours.
1 DEVONSHIRE TEERACE, YORK GATE,
REGENT'S PARK,
7th July 1842. -'••
MACREADY AS 'BENEDICT'
[MAKCH 4, 1843]
Much Ado about Nothing and Comus were repeated on Tues-
day to a crowded house.1 They were received with no less
enthusiasm than on the night of Mr. Macready's benefit, and
are announced for repetition twice a week.
We are desirous to say a few words of Mr. Macready's
performance of Benedick; not because its striking merits re-
quire any commendation to those who witness it — as is suf-
i Drury Lane Theatre.
26 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ficiently shown by its reception — but .because justice is
scarcely done to his impersonation of the character, as we
think, by some of those who have reported upon it for the
nobility and gentry (not quite so limited a one as could be
desired, perhaps), who seldom enter a theatre unless it be a
foreign one ; or who, when they do repair to an English
temple of the drama, would seem to be attracted thither solely
by an amiable desire to purify, by their presence, a scene of
vice and indecorum ; and who select their place of entertain-
ment accordingly.
There are many reasons why a tragic actor incurs consid-
erable risk of failing to enlist the sympathies of his audience
when he appears in comedy. In the first place, some people
are rather disposed to take it ill that he should make them
laugh who has so often made them cry. In the second, he
has not only to make the impression which he seeks to pro-
duce in that particular character, but has to render it at
once, so obvious and distinct, as to cast into oblivion for the
time all the host of grave associations with which he is iden-
tified. Lastly, there is a very general feeling abroad in ref-
erence to all the arts, and every phase of public life, that the
path which a man has trodden for many years — even though
it should be the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire — must
•be of necessity his allotted one, and that it is, as a matter of
course, the only one in which he is qualified to walk.
First impressions, too, even with persons of a cultivated
understanding, have an immense effect in settling their no-
tions of a character; and it is no heresy to say that many
people unconsciously form their opinion of such a creation
as Benedick, not so much from the exercise of their own judg-
ment in reading the play, as from what they have seen bodily
presented to them on the stage. Thus, when they call to
mind that in such a place Mr. A. or Mr. B. used to stick his
arms akimbo and shake his head knowingly ; or that in such
another place he gave the pit to understand, by certain con-
fidential nods and winks, that in good time they should see
what they should see ; or in such another place, swaggered ;
or in such another place, with one hand clasping each of his
sides, heaved his shoulders as with laughter; they recall his
MACREADY AS 'BENEDICT' 27
image, not as the Mr. A. or B. aforesaid, but as Shake-
speare's Benedick — the real Benedick of the book, not the
conventional Benedick of the boards — and missing any fa-
miliar action, miss, as it were, something of right belonging
to the part.
Against all of these difficulties Mr. Macready has had to
contend, as any such man must, in his performance of Ben-
edick, and yet before his very first scene was over on the first
night of the revival, the whole house felt that there was be-
fore them a presentment of the character so fresh, distinct,
vigorous, and enjoyable, as they could not choose but relish,
and go along with, delightedly, to the fall of the curtain.
If it be beyond the province of what we call genteel com-
edy— a term which Shakespeare would have had some diffi-
culty in understanding, perhaps — to make people laugh, then,
assuredly, Mr. Macready is far from being a genteelly comic
Benedick. But as we find him — Signior Benedick of Padua,
that is, not the Benedick of this or that theatrical company
— the constant occasion of merriment among the persons rep-
resented in Much Ado about Nothing, 'all mirth,' as Don
Pedro has it, 'from the crown of his head to the sole of his
foot' ; and as we find him, in particular, constantly moving
to laughter both the Prince and Claudio, who may be reason-
ably supposed to possess their share of refined and courtier-
like behaviour; we venture to think that those who sit below
the salt, or t' other side the lamps, should laugh also. And
that they did and do, both loud and long, let the ringing
walls of Drury Lane bear witness.
Judging of it by analogy ; by comparison with anything
we know in nature, literature, art ; by any test we can apply
to it, from within us or without, we can imagine no purer or
higher piece of genuine comedy than Mr. Macready's per-
formance of the scene in the orchard after emerging from
the arbour. As he sat, uneasily cross-legged, on the garden
chair, with that face of grave bewilderment and puzzled con-
templation, we seemed to be looking on a picture by Leslie.
It was just such a figure as that excellent artist, in his fine
appreciation of the finest humour, might have delighted to
produce. Those who consider it broad, or farcical, or over-
28 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
strained, cannot surely have considered all the train and
course of circumstances leading up to that place. If they
take them into reasonable account, and try to imagine for a
moment how any master of fiction would have described Ben-
edicts behaviour at that crisis — supposing it had been
impossible to contemplate the appearance of a living man in
the part, and therefore necessary to describe it at all — can
they arrive at any other conclusion than that such ideas as
are here presented by Mr. Macready would have been written
down? Refer to any passage in any play of Shakespeare's,
where it has been necessary to describe, as occurring beyond
the scene, the behaviour of a man in a situation of ludicrous
perplexity; and by that standard alone (to say nothing of
any mistaken notion of natural behaviour that may have
suggested itself at any time to Goldsmith, Swift, Fielding,
Smollett, Sterne, Scott, or other such unenlightened jour-
neymen) criticise, if you please, this portion of Mr. Mac-
ready's admirable performance.
The nice distinction between such an aspect of the char-
acter as this, and the after love scenes with Beatrice, the chal-
lenging of Claudia, or the gay endurance and return of the
Prince's jests at last, was such as none but a master could
have expressed, though the veriest tyro in the house might
feel its truth when presented to him. It occurred to us that
Mr. Macready's avoidance of Beatrice in the second act was
a little too earnest and real ; but it is hard dealing to find so
slight a blemish in such a finished and exquisite performance.
For such, in calm reflection, and not in the excitement of hav-
ing recently witnessed it, we unaffectedly and impartially be-
lieve it to be.
The other characters are, for the most part, exceedingly
well played. Claudio, in the gay and gallant scenes, has an
efficient representative in Mr. Anderson; but his perfect in-
difference to Hero's supposed death is an imputation on his
good sense, and a disagreeable circumstance in the represen-
tation of the play, which we should be heartily glad to see
removed. Mr. Compton has glimpses of Dogberry, though
iron was never harder than he. If he could but derive a little
oil from his contact with Keeley (whose utter absorption in
THE OXFORD COMMISSION 29
his learned neighbour is amazing), he would become an in-
finitely better leader of the Prince's Watch. Mrs. Nisbett
is no less charming than at first, and Miss Fortescue is more
so, from having a greater share of confidence in her bearing,
and a somewhat smaller nosegay in her breast. Both Mr.
Phelps and Mr. W. Bennett deserve especial notice, as acting
at once with great spirit and great discretion.
Let those who still cling to the opinion that the Senate of
ancient Rome represented by five-shillings' worth of super-
numerary assistance huddled together at a rickety table, with
togas above the cloth and corduroys below, is more gratify-
ing and instructive to behold than the living Truth pre-
sented to them in Coriolanus during Mr. Macready's man-
agement of Covent Garden, — let such admirers of the theatre
track the mazes of the wild wood in Comus, as it is now pro-
duced ; let them look upon the stage, what time
'He and his monstrous rout are heard to howl,
Like stabbed wolves, or tigers at their prey,
Doing abhorred rights to Hecate
In their obscured haunts of inmost bowers,'
— and reconcile their previous notions with any principle of
human reason, if they can.
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS AP-
POINTED TO INQUIRE INTO THE CON-
DITION OF THE PERSONS VARIOUSLY
ENGAGED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
OXFORD
[JUNE 3, 1843]
IT can scarcely be necessary for us to remind our readers
that a Commission under the Great Seal was appointed some
months since, to inquire into the deplorable amount of igno-
rance and superstition alleged to prevail in the University of
Oxford ; concerning which, the representatives of that learned
30 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
body in the Commons' House of Parliament, had then, and
have since, at divers times, publicly volunteered the most
alarming and astounding evidence. The Commission was
addressed to those gentlemen who had investigated the moral
condition of the Children and Young Persons employed in
Mines and Manufactories; it being wisely considered that
their opportunities of reporting on the darkness of Colleges
as compared with Mines, and on the prejudicial atmosphere
of Seats of Learning as compared with Seats of Labour,
would be highly advantageous to the public interest, and
might possibly open the public eyes.
The Commissioners have ever since been actively engaged
in pursuing their inquiries into this subject, and deducing
from the mass of evidence such conclusions as appeared to
them to be warranted by the facts. Their Report is now
before us, and though it has not yet been presented to Par-
liament, we venture to give it entire.
The Commissioners find :
First, with regard to EMPLOYMENT —
That the intellectual works in the University of Oxford
are, in all essential particulars, precisely what they were when
it was first established for the Manufacture of Clergymen.
That they alone have stood still (or, in the very few in-
stances in which they have moved at all, have moved back-
ward), when all other works have advanced and improved.
That the nature of the employment in which the young per-
sons are engaged is, by reason of its excessive dust and rust,
extremely pernicious and destructive. That they all become
short-sighted in a most remarkable degree ; that, for the most
part, they lose the use of their reason at a very early age,
and are seldom known to recover it. That the most hopeless
and painful extremes of deafness and blindness are frequent
among them. That they are reduced to such a melancholy
state of apathy and indifference as to be willing to sign any-
thing, without asking what it is, or knowing what it means ;
which is a common custom with these unhappy persons, even
to the extent of nine-and-thirty articles at once. That, from
the monotonous nature of their employment, and the dull
routine of their unvarying drudgery (which requires no
THE OXFORD COMMISSION 31
exercise of original intellectual power, but is a mere parrot-
like performance), they become painfully uniform in char-
acter and perception, and are reduced to one dead level (a
very dead one, as your Commissioners believe) of mental im-
becility. That cramps and paralysis of all the higher fac-
ulties of the brain are the ordinary results of this system of
labour. And your Commissioners can truly add, that they
found nothing in the avocations of the miners of Scotland,
the knife-grinders of Sheffield, or the workers in iron of
Wolverhampton, one-half so prejudicial to the persons en-
gaged therein, or one-half so injurious to society, as this
fatal system of employment in the University of Oxford.
Secondly, with regard to the PREVAILING IGNORANCE —
That the condition of the University of Oxford, under
this head, is of the most appalling kind ; insomuch that your
Commissioners are firmly of opinion that, taking all the at-
tendant circumstances into consideration, the Young Persons
employed in Mines and Manufactories are enlightened be-
ings, radiant with intelligence, and overflowing with the best
results of knowledge, when compared with the persons, young
and old, employed in the Manufacture of Clergymen at Ox-
ford. And your Commissioners have been led to this con-
clusion : not so much by the perusal of prize poems, and a
due regard to the very small number of Young Persons
accustomed to University Employment who distinguish them-
selves in after life, or become in any way healthy and whole-
some ; as by immediate reference to the evidence taken on the
two Commissions, and an impartial consideration of the two
classes of testimony, side by side.
That it is unquestionably true that a boy was examined
under the Children's Employment Commission, at Brinsley,
in Derbyshire, who had been three years at school, and could
not spell 'Church' ; whereas there is no doubt that the persons
employed in the University of Oxford can all spell Church
with great readiness, and, indeed, very seldom spell anything
else. But, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that,
in the minds of the persons employed in the University of
Oxford, such comprehensive words as justice, mercy, charity,
kindness, brotherly love, forbearance, gentleness, and Good
32 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Works, awaken no ideas whatever; while the evidence shows
that the most preposterous notions are attached to the mere
terms Priest and Faith. One young person, employed in a
Mine, had no other idea of a Supreme Being than 'that he
had heard him constantly damned at' ; but use the verb to
damn, in this horrible connection, with the Fountain Head
of Mercy, in the active sense, instead of in the passive one;
and make the Deity the nominative case instead of the objec-
tive ; and how many persons employed in the University of
Oxford have their whole faith in, and whole knowledge of,
the Maker of the World, presented in a worse and far more
impious sentence !
That the answers of persons employed in the said Univer-
sity, to questions put to them by the Sub-Commissioners in
the progress of this inquiry, bespoke a moral degradation
infinitely lower than any brought to light in Mines and Fac-
tories, as may be gathered from the following examples. A
vast number of witnesses being interrogated as to what they
understood by the words Religion and Salvation, answered
Lighted Candles. Some said water; some, bread; others,
little boys; others mixed the water, lighted candles, bread,
and little boys all up together, and called the compound,
Faith. Others again, being asked if they deemed it to be a
matter of great interest in Heaven, and of high moment in the
vast scale of creation, whether a poor human priest should
put on, at a certain time, a white robe or a black one ; or
should turn his face to the East or to the West; or should
bend his knees of clay ; or stand, or worm on end upon the
earth, said 'Yes, they did': and being further questioned,
whether a man could hold such mummeries in his contempt,
and pass to everlasting rest, said boldly, 'No.' (See evidence
of Pusey and others.}
And one boy (quite an old ooy, too, who might have known
better) being interrogated in a public class, as to whether it
was his opinion that a man who professed to go to church
was of necessity a better man than one who went to chapel,
also answered 'Yes'; which your Commissioners submit, is an
example of ignorance, besotted dulness, and obstinacy, wholly
THE OXFORD COMMISSION 33
without precedent in the inquiry limited to Mines and Fac-
tories ; and is such as the system of labour adopted in the
University of Oxford could alone produce. (See evidence
of Inglis.) In the former Commission, one boy anticipated
all examination by volunteering the remark, 'that he warn't
no judge of nuffin'; but the persons employed in the Univer-
sity of Oxford, almost to a man, concur in saying 'that they
ain't no judges of nuffin' (with the unimportant exception of
other men's souls ) ; and that, believing in the divine ordination
of any minister to whom they may take a fancy, 'they ain't
answerable for nuffin to nobody'; which your Commissioners
again submit is an infinitely worse case, and is fraught with
much greater mischief to the general welfare. (See the ev-
idence in general.)
We humbly represent to your Majesty that the persons
who give these answers, and hold these opinions, and are in
this alarming state of ignorance and bigotry, have it in their
power to do much more evil than the other ill-qualified
teachers of Young Persons employed in Mines and Facto-
ries, inasmuch as those were voluntary instructors of youth,
who can be removed at will, and as the public improvement
demands, whereas these are the appointed Sunday teachers
of the empire, forced by law upon your Majesty's subjects,
and not removable for incompetence or misconduct otherwise
than by certain overseers called Bishops, who are, in general,
more incompetent and worse conducted than themselves.
Wherefore it is our loyal duty to recommend to your Majesty
that the pecuniary, social, and political privileges now aris-
ing from the degradation and debasement of the minds and
morals of your Majesty's subjects, be no longer granted to
these persons; or at least that if they continue to exercise
an exclusive power of conferring Learned degrees and dis-
tinctions, the titles of the same be so changed and altered,
that they may in some degree express the tenets in right of
which they are bestowed. And this, we suggest to your
Majesty, may be done without any great violation of the
true Conservative principle: inasmuch as the initial letters of
the present degrees (not by any means the least important
34 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
parts of them) may still be retained as Bachelor of Ab-
surdity, Master of Arrogance, Doctor of Church Lunacy,
and the like.
All which we humbly certify to your Majesty.
THOMAS TOOKE (L.S.)
T. SOUTHWOOD SMITH (L.S.)
LEONARD HORNEE (L.S.)
ROBT. J. SAUNDERS (L.S.)
WESTMINSTER, June 1, 1843.
IGNORANCE AND CRIME l
[APRIL 22, 1848]
A REMARKABLE document, and one suggesting many weighty
considerations and supplying much important evidence in
reference to the alliance of crime with ignorance, has been
recently published by the Government. It is a statement of
the number of persons taken into custody by the Metropolitan
Police, summarily disposed of, and tried and convicted in
the year 1847; to which are appended certain comparative
statements from the years 1831 to 1847 inclusive.
In one part of this return the various trades and profes-
sions of the various persons taken into custody in the course
of the year, are set forth in detail. Although this informa-
tion is necessarily imperfect, in the absence of an accurate
statistical return, set forth side by side with it, of the gross
number of persons pursuing each of such trades or profes-
sions in the metropolis, it is very curious. Out of a total of
between forty-one and forty-two thousand male offenders dis-
tributed over seventy-nine trades, twelve thousand four hun-
dred and ten are labourers, of whom one-twelfth offended
against the vagrant laws. Next in point of number come
sailors, who exceed eighteen hundred. Next, the carpenters,
who are about a hundred below the sailors. Next, the shoe-
i The Manuscript of this article is in the Dyce and Forster Collection
in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and bears the title of 'London
Crime.* It is hare printed from the MS.
IGNORANCE AND CRIME 35
makers, who muster some six hundred weaker than the car-
penters. Next, the tailors, who are about a hundred in the
rear of the shoemakers. Next, the bricklayers, who are
again about a hundred below the tailors. And so on down
to four sheriff's officers, three clergymen, and one umbrella-
maker. Nor are the offences of each class less notable.
Thus, of the three clergymen, one is drunk, one disorderly,
and one pugilistic ; which is exactly the case with the sher-
iff's officers. The solitary umbrella-maker figures as a mur-
derer. Of five parish officers, one is a suspicious character,
one a horse stealer, and three commit assaults. Of sixteen
postmen, seven steal money from letters, and six get drunk.
Butchers are more disposed to common assaults than to any
other class of offence. The chief weakness of carpenters is
drunkenness ; after that, a disposition to assault the lieges ;
after that, a tendency to petty larceny. Tailors, as we all
know, are disorderly in their drink, and pot-valiant. Female
servants are greatly tempted into theft. Ill-paid milliners
and dressmakers would seem to lapse the most into such
offences as may be supposed to arise from, or lead to, pros-
titution.
One extraordinary feature of the tables, is the immense
number of persons who have no trade or occupation, which
may be stated, in round numbers, as amounting to eleven
thousand one hundred out of forty-one thousand men, and
to seventeen thousand one hundred out of twenty thousand
five hundred women. *Of this last-mentioned number of
women, nine thousand can neither read nor write, eleven thou-
sand can only read, or read and write imperfectly, and only
fourteen can read and write well! The proportion of total
ignorance, among the men, is as thirteen thousand out of
forty-one thousand; only one hundred and fifty out of all
that forty-one thousand can read and write well ; and no more
knowledge than the mere ability to blunder over a book like
a little child, or to read and write imperfectly, is possessed
by the rest. This state of mental comparison is what has
been commonly called 'education* in England for a good
many years. And that ill-used word might, quite as reason-
ably, be employed to express a teapot.
36 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
It should be remembered that the very best aspect of this
widely diffused ignorance among criminals, is presented
through the medium of these returns, and that they are
probably unduly favourable to the attainments of these
wretched persons. It is one of the properties of ignorance
to believe itself wiser than it is. Striking instances are
within our knowledge in which this alleged ability to read
well, and write a little — appearing to be claimed by offenders
in perfect good faith — has proved, on examination, scarcely
to include the lowest rudiments of a child's first primer. Of
this vast number of women who have no trade or occupation
— seventeen thousand out of twenty thousand — it is prett}'
certain that an immense majority have never been instructed1
in the commonest household duties, or the plainest use of
needle and thread. Every day's experience in our great
prisons shows the prevailing ignorance in these respects
among the women who are constantly passing and repassing
through them, to be scarcely less than their real ignorance
of the arts of reading and writing and the moral ends to
which they conduce. And in the face of such prodigious
facts, sects and denominations of Christians quarrel with each
other and leave the prisons full up and ever filling with people
who begin to be educated within the prison walls !
The notion that education for the general people is com-
prised in the faculty of tumbling over words, letter by letter,
and syllable by syllable, like the learned pig, or of making
staggering pothooks and hangers inclining to the right, has
surely had its day by this time, and a long day too. The
comfortable conviction that a parrot acquaintance with the
Church Catechism and the Commandments is enough shoe-
leather for poor pilgrims by the Slough of Despond, suffi-
cient armour against the Giants Slay-Good and Despair, and a
sort of Parliamentary train for third-class passengers to the
beautiful Gate of the City, must be pulled up by the roots, as
its growth will overshadow this land. Side by side with
Crime, Disease, and Misery in England, Ignorance is always
brooding, and is always certain to be found. The union of
Night with Darkness is not more certain and indisputable.
Schools of Industry, schools where the simple knowledge
THE CHINESE JUNK 37
learned from books is made pointedly useful, and immediately
applicable to the duties and business of life, directly con-
ducive to order, cleanliness, punctuality, and economy —
schools where the sublime lessons of the New Testament are
made the superstructure to be reared, enduringly, on such
foundations ; not frittered away piece-meal into harassing
intelligibilities, and associated with weariness, languor, and
distaste, by the use of the Gospel as a dog's-eared spelling-
book, than which nothing in what is called instruction is
more common, and nothing more to be condemned — schools
on such principles, deep as the lowest depth of Society, and
leaving none of its dregs untouched, are the only means of
removing the scandal and the danger that beset us in this
nineteenth century of our Lord. Their motto they may take
from MORE : 'Let the State prevent vices, and take away the
occasions for offences by well ordering its subjects, and not
by suffering wickedness to increase, afterward to be pun-
ished.'
Old Sir Peter Laurie's sagacity does not appear by these
returns to have quite 'put down' suicide yet. It has re-
mained almost as steady, indeed, as if the world rejoiced in
no such magnate. Four years ago, the number of metro-
politan suicides committed in a twelvemonth was one hundred
and fifty-five; last year it was one hundred and fifty-two:
not to mention two thousand persons reported last year to the
police as lost or missing, of whom only half were found again.
THE CHINESE JUNK
[JUNE 24, 1848]
THE shortest road to the Celestial Empire is by the Blackwall
railway. You may take a ticket, through and back, for a
matter of eighteen pence. With every carriage that is cast
off on the road — at Stepney, Limehouse, Poplar, West India
docks — thousands of miles of space are cast off too, the flying
dream of tiles and chimney-pots, backs of squalid houses,
frowzy pieces of waste ground, narrow courts and streets,
38 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
swamps, ditches, masts of ships, gardens of dock-weed, and
unwholesome little bowers of scarlet beans, whirls away in
half a score of minutes. Nothing is left but China.
How the flower j region ever got, in the form of the junk
Keying, into the latitude and longitude where it is now to be
found, is not the least part of the marvel. The crew of
Chinamen aboard the Keying devoutly believed that their
good ship would arrive quite safe, at the desired port, if they
only tied red rags enough upon the mast, rudder, and cable.
Perhaps they ran short of rag, through bad provision of
stores; certain it is, that they had not enough on board to
keep them from the bottom, and would most indubitably have
gone there, but for such poor aid as could be rendered by the
skill and coolness of a dozen English sailors, who brought
this extraordinary craft in safety over the wide ocean.
If there be any one thing in the world that it is not at all
like, that thing is a ship of any kind. So narrow, so long,
so grotesque, so low in the middle, so high at each end (like
a China pen-tray), with no rigging, with nowhere to go
aloft, with mats for sails, great warped cigars for masts,
gaudy dragons and sea monsters disporting themselves from
stem to stern, and, on the stern, a gigantic cock of impossible
aspect, defying the world (as well he may) to produce his
equal — it would look more at home at the top of a public
building, at the top of a mountain, in an avenue of trees,
or down in a mine, than afloat on the water. Of all unlikely
callings with which imagination could connect the Chinese
lounging on the deck, the most unlikely and the last would
be the mariner's craft. Imagine a ship's crew, without a
profile among them, in gauze pinafores and plaited hair;
wearing stiff clogs, a quarter of a foot thick in the sole ; and
lying at night in little scented boxes, like backgammon men
or chess pieces, or mother of pearl counters !
The most perplexing considerations obtrude themselves on
your mind when you go down in the cabin. As, what became
of all those lanterns hanging to the roof, when the junk was
out at sea? Whether they dangled there, hanging and beating
against each other, like so many jesters' baubles? Whether
the idol, Chin Tee, of the eighteen arms, enshrined in a
THE CHINESE JUNK 39
celestial Puppet Show, in the place of honour, ever tumbled
out in heavy weather? Whether the incense and the joss-
stick still burnt before her with a faint perfume and a little
thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were roaring all
around? Whether that preposterous umbrella in the corner
was always spread, as being a convenient maritime instru-
ment for walking about the decks with, in a storm ? Whether
all the cool and shiny little chairs and tables were contin-
ually sliding about and bruising each other, and if not, why
not? Whether anybody, on the voyage, ever read those two
books printed in characters like bird-cages and fly-traps?
Whether the Mandarin passenger, He Sing, who had never
been ten miles from home in his life before, lying sick on a
bamboo couch in a private China closet of his own (where
he is now perpetually writing autographs for inquisitive
barbarians), ever began to doubt the potency of the goddess
of the sea, whose counterfeit presentment, like a flowery
monthly nurse, occupies the sailors' joss-house in the second
gallery? Whether it is possible that the said Mandarin, or
the artist of the ship, Sam Sing, Esquire, R.A., of Canton,
can ever go ashore without a walking staff of cinnamon,
agreeably to the usage of their likenesses in British tea-
shops? Above all, whether the hoarse old ocean can ever
have been seriously in earnest with this floating toy shop,
or merely played with it in lightness of spirit — roughly, but
meaning no harm — as the bull did with the china-shop, on
St. Patrick's day in the morning?
Here, at any rate, is the doctrine of finality beautifully
worked out, and shut up in a corner of a dock near the
Whitebait-house at Blackwall, for the edification of men.
Thousands of years have passed away since the first Chinese
junk was constructed on this model ; and the last Chinese junk
that was ever launched was none the better for that waste
and desert of time. In all that interval, through all the im-
mense extent of the strange kingdom of China — in the midst
of its patient and ingenious, but never advancing art, and
its diligent agricultural cultivation — not one new twist or
curve has been given to a ball of ivory; not one blade of
experience has been grown.
40 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The general eye has opened no wider, and seen no farther,
than the mimic eye upon this vessel's prow, by means of
which she is supposed to find her way ; or has been set in
the flowery-head to as little purpose, for thousands of years.
Sir Robert Inglis, member for the University of Oxford,
ought to become Ty Kong or managing man of the Keying,
and nail the red rag of his party to the mast for ever.
There is no doubt, it appears, that if any alteration took
place, in this junk or any other, the Chinese form of gov-
ernment would be destroyed. It has been clearly ascertained
by the wise men and lawgivers that to make the cock upon the
stern (the Grand Falcon of China) by a feather's breadth
a less startling phenomenon, or to bring him within the
remotest verge of ornithological possibility, would be to
endanger the noblest institutions of the country. For it is a
remarkable circumstance in China (which is found to obtain
nowhere else) that although its institutions are the perfection
of human wisdom, and are the wonder and envy of the world
by reason of their stability, they are constantly imperilled
in the last degree by very slight occurrences. So, such won-
derful contradictions as the neatness of the Keying's cups
and saucers, and the ridiculous rudeness of her guns and
rudder, continue to exist. If any Chinese maritime genera-
tion were the wiser for the wisdom of the generation gone
before, it is agreed upon by all the Ty Kongs in the navy
that the Chinese constitution would immediately go by the
board, and that the church of the Chinese Bonzes would be
effectually done for.
It is pleasant, coming out from behind the wooden screen
that encloses this interesting and remarkable sight (which all
who can, should see), to glance upon the mighty signs of
life, enterprise, and progress that the great river and its
busy banks present. It is pleasant, coming back from China
by the Blackwell railway, to think that WE trust no red rags
in storms, and burn no joss-sticks before idols; that WE
never grope our way by the aid of conventional eyes which
have no sight in them ; and that, in our civilisation, we sac-
rifice absurd forms to substantial facts. The ignorant crew
of the Keying refused to enter on the ship's books, until 'a
considerable amount of silvered paper, tinfoil, and joss-
sticks' had been laid in, by the owners, for the purposes of
their worship ; but OUE seamen — far less our bishops, priests,
and deacons — never stand out upon points of silvered paper
and tinfoil, or the lighting up of joss-sticks upon altars!
Christianity is not Chin-Teeism ; and therein all insignificant
quarrels as to means, are lost sight of in remembrance of the
end.
There is matter for reflection aboard the Keying to last the
voyage home to England again.
CRUIKSHANK'S 'THE DRUNKARD'S
CHILDREN'
[JULY 8, 1848]
A 'SEQUEL TO THE BOTTLE,' 1 seems to us to demand a few
words by way of gentle protest. Few men have a better
right to erect themselves into teachers of the people than Mr,
George Cruikshank. Few men have observed the people as
he has done, or know them better; few are more earnestly
and honestly disposed to teach them for their good; and
there are very, very few artists, in England or abroad, who
can approach him in his peculiar and remarkable power.
But this teaching, to last, must be fairly conducted. It
must not be all on one side. When Mr. Cruikshank shows
us, and shows us so forcibly and vigorously, that side of the
medal on which the people in their crimes and faults are
stamped, he is bound to help us to a glance at that other side
on which the government that forms the people, with all its
faults and vices, is no less plainly impressed. Drunkenness,
as a national horror, is the effect of many causes. Foul
smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and workshop
customs, want of light, air, and water, the absence of all
easy means of decency and health, are commonest among its
common, everyday, physical causes. The mental weariness
i The Drunkard's Children. A Sequel to the Bottle. In eight Plates.
By George Cruikshank.
42 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and languor so induced, the want of wholesome relaxation,
the craving for some stimulus and excitement, which is as
much a part of such lives as the sun is ; and, last and inclu-
sive of all the rest, ignorance, and the need there is amongst
the English people of reasonable, rational training, in lieu
of mere parrot-education, or none at all ; are its most obvious
moral causes. It would be as sound philosophy to issue a
series of plates under the title of The Physic Bottle, or the
Saline Mixture, and, tracing the history of typhus fever by
such means, to refer it all to the gin-shop, as it is to refer
Drunkenness thither and to stop there. Drunkenness does
not begin there. It has a teeming and reproachful history
anterior to that stage ; and at the remediable evil in that his-
tory, it is the duty of the moralist, if he strikes at all, to
strike deep and spare not.
Hogarth avoided the Drunkard's Progress, we conceive,
precisely because the causes of drunkenness among the poor
were so numerous and widely spread, and lurked so sorrow-
fully deep and far down in all human misery, neglect, and
despair, that even his pencil could not bring them fairly and
justly into the light. That he was never contented with
beginning at the effect, witness the Miser (his shoe new-
soled with the binding of his Bible) dead before the Young
Rake begins his career; the worldly father, listless daughter,
impoverished nobleman, and crafty lawyer in the first plate of
the Marriage a la Mode; the detestable advances in the Stages
of Cruelty ; and the progress downward of Thomas Idle !
That he did not spare that kind of drunkenness which was of
more 'respectable' engenderment, his midnight modern con-
versation, the election plates, and a crowd of stupid alder-
men and other guzzlers, amply testify. But after one im-
mortal journey down Gin Lane, he turned away in grief and
sorrow — perhaps in hope of better things one day, from
better laws, and schools, and poor men's homes — and went
back no more. It is remarkable of that picture, that while
it exhibits drunkenness in its most appalling forms, it forces
on the attention of the spectator a most neglected, wretched
neighbourhood (the same that is only just now cleared away
for the extension of Oxford Street) and an unwholesome,
'THE DRUNKARD'S CHILDREN' 4S
indecent, abject condition of life, worthy to be a Frontispiece
to the late Report of the Sanitary Commissioners, made
nearly one hundred years afterwards. We have always been
inclined to think the purpose of this piece not adequately
stated, even by Charles Lamb. 'The very houses seem abso-
lutely reeling,' it is true ; but they quite as powerfully indi-
cate some of the more prominent causes of intoxication among
the neglected orders of society, as any of its effects. There
is no evidence that any of the actors in the dreary scene
have ever been much better off than we find them. The best
are pawning the commonest necessaries, and tools of their
trades, and the worst are homeless vagrants who give us no
clue to their having been otherwise in bygone days. All are
living and dying miserably. Nobody is interfering for pre-
vention or for cure in the generation going out before us,
or the generation coming in. The beadle (the only sober
man in the composition except the pawnbroker) is mightily
indifferent to the orphan-child crying beside its parent's coffin.
The little charity-girls are not so well taught or looked after,
but that they can take to dram-drinking already. The
church is very prominent and handsome, but coldly surveys
these things, in progress underneath the shadow of its tower
(it was in the year of grace eighteen hundred and forty-
eight that a Bishop of London first came out respecting some-
thing wrong in poor men's social accommodations), and is
passive in the picture. We take all this to have a meaning,
and to the best of our knowledge it has not grown obsolete in
a century.
Whereas, to all such considerations Mr. Cruikshank gives
the go-by. The hero of the Bottle, and father of these chil-
dren, lived in undoubted comfort and good esteem until he
was some five-and-thirty years of age, when, happening,
unluckily, to have a goose for dinner one day in the bosom
of his thriving family, he jocularly sent out for a bottle of
gin, and persuaded his wife (until then a pattern of neatness
and good housewifery) to take a little drop, after the stuffing,
from which moment the family never left off drinking gin,
and rushed downhill to destruction, very fast.
Entertaining the highest respect for Mr. Cruikshank's
44 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
great genius, and no less respect for his motives in these
publications, we deem it right on the appearance of a sequel
to the Bottle, to protest against this. First, because it is a
compromising of a very serious and pressing truth ; secondly,
because it will, in time, defeat the end these pictures are de-
signed to bring about. There is no class of society so certain
to find out their weak place, as the class to which they are
especially addressed. It is particularly within their knowl-
edge and experience.
In the present series we trace the brother and sister whom
we left in that terrible representation of the father's mad-
ness with which the first series closed, through the career of
vice and crime then lowering before them. The gin-shop,
6eer-shop, and dancing-rooms receive them in turn. They
are tried for a robbery. The boy is convicted, and sentenced
to transportation ; the girl acquitted. He dies, prematurely,
on board the hulks ; and she, desolate and mad, flings herself
from London Bridge into the night-darkened river.
The power of this closing scene is extraordinary. It
haunts the remembrance, like an awful reality. It is full
of passion and terror, and we question whether any other
hand could so have rendered it. Nor, although far exceed-
ing all that has gone before, as such a catastrophe should, is
it without the strongest support all through the story.
The death-bed scene on board the hulks — the convict who is
composing the face — and the other who is drawing the screen
round the bed's head — are masterpieces, worthy of the great-
est painter. The reality of the place, and the fidelity with
which every minute object illustrative of it is presented, are
quite surprising. But the same feature is remarkable
throughout. In the trial scene at the Old Bailey the eye may
wander round the court, and observe everything that is a
part of the place. The very light and atmosphere of the
reality are reproduced with astonishing truth. So in the gin-
shop and the beer-shop ; no fragment of the fact is indicated
and slurred over, but every shred of it is honestly made out.
It is curious, in closing the book, to recall the number of
faces we have seen that have as much individual character
identity in our remembrance as if we had been looking at
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 45
so many living people of flesh and blood. The man behind the
bar in the gin-shop, the barristers round the table in court,
the convicts already mentioned, will be, like the figures in
the pictures of which the Spanish Friar spoke to Wilkie,
realities, when thousands of living shadows shall have passed
away. May Mr. Cruikshank linger long behind to give us
many more of such realities, and to do with simple means,
such as are used here, what the whole paraphernalia and
resources of Art could not effect, without a master hand!
The Sequel to the Bottle is published at the same price as
its predecessor. The eight large plates may be bought for
a shilling!
THE NIGER EXPEDITION
[AUGUST 19, 1848]
IT might be laid down as a very good general rule of social
and political guidance, that whatever Exeter Hall champions,
is the thing by no means to be done. If it were harmless on
a cursory view, if it even appeared to have some latent grain
of common-sense at the bottom of it — which is a very rare
ingredient in any of the varieties of gruel that are made
thick and slab by the weird old women who go about, and
exceedingly roundabout, on the Exeter Hall platform — such
advocacy might be held to be a final and fatal objection to
it, and to any project capable of origination in the wisdom
or folly of man.
The African Expedition, of which these volumes 1 contain
the melancholy history, is in no respect an exception to the
rule. Exeter Hall was hot in its behalf, and it failed.
Exeter Hall was hottest on its weakest and most hopeless
objects, and in those it failed (of course) most signally.
i 'Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her Majesty's Government to
the River Niger in 1841, under the command of Captain H. D. Trotter,
R.N.' By Captain William Allen, R.N., Commander of H.M.S. Wilber-
force, and T. R. H. Thomson, M.D., one of the medical officers of the
Expedition. Published with the sanction of the Colonial Office and the
Admiralty. Two vols. Bentley.
46 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Not, as Captain Allen justly claims for himself and his gal-
lant comrades, not through any want of courage and self-
devotion on the part of those to whom it was entrusted — the
sufferings of all, the deaths of many, the dismal wear and
tear of stout frames and brave spirits, sadly attest the fact ;
— but because, if the ends sought to be attained are to be
won, they must be won by other means than the exposure of
inestimable British lives to certain destruction by an enemy
against which no gallantry can contend, and the enactment
of a few broad farces for the entertainment of a King Obi,
King Boy, and other such potentates, whose respect for the
British force is, doubtless, likely to be very much enhanced
by their relishing experience of British credulity in such
representations, and our perfect impotency in opposition to
their climate, their falsehood, and deceit.
The main ends to be attained by the Expedition were these :
The abolition, in great part, of the Slave-Trade, by means
of treaties with native chiefs, to whom were to be explained
the immense advantages of general unrestricted commerce
with Great Britain in lieu thereof; the substitution of free
for slave labour in the dominions of those chiefs; the intro-
duction into Africa of an improved system of agricultural
cultivation; the abolition of human sacrifices; the diffusion
among those Pagans of the true doctrines of Christianity;
and a few other trifling points, no less easy of attainment.
A glance at this short list, and a retrospective glance at
the great number of generations during which they have
all been comfortably settled in our own civilised land, never
more to be the subjects of dispute, will tend to materially
remove any aspect of slight difficulty they may present. To
make the treaties, certain officers of the Expedition were
constituted her Majesty's Commissioners. To render them
attractive to the native chiefs, a store of presents was pro-
vided. And to enforce them, 'one or more small forts' were
to be built, on land to be bought for the purpose on the
banks of the Niger; which forts were 'to assist in the aboli-
tion of the Slave-Trade, and further the innocent trade of
her Majesty's subjects.' The Niger was to be explored, the
resources and productions of the country were to be inquired
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 47
into and reported on, and various important and scientific
observations, astronomical, geographical, and otherwise, were
to be made ; but these were by the way. A Model Farm was
to be established by an agricultural society at home ; and
besides allowing stowage-room on board ship for its vari-
ous stores, implements, etc., the Admiralty granted a free
passage to Mr. Alfred Carr, a West Indian gentleman of
colour, engaged as its superintendent. By all these means
combined, as Dr. Lushington and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton
wrote to Lord John Russell, who was then Colonial Secretary,
the people of Africa were 'to be awakened to a proper sense
of their own degradation.'
On this awakening mission three vessels were appointed.
They were flat-bottomed iron steam vessels, built for the
purpose. The Albert and the Wilberforce, each 139 feet
4 inches in length, and 27 feet in breadth of beam, and draw-
ing 6 feet water, were in all respects exactly alike. The
Soudan, intended for detached service, was much smaller,
and drew a foot and a half less water. They were very
ingeniously conceived, with certain rudder-tails and sliding
keels for sea service ; but they performed most unaccountable
antics in bad weather, and had a perverse tendency to go
to leeward, which nothing would conquer. Dr. Reid fitted
them up with Avhat 'My Lords' describe as an ingenious and
costly ventilating apparatus, the preparation of which occa-
sioned a loss of much valuable time, and the practical effect
of which was to suffocate the crews. 'That truly amiable
Prince,' the Prince Consort, came on board at Woolwich,
and gave a handsome gold chronometer to each of the three
captains. The African Civilisation Society came down with
a thousand pounds. The Church of England Missionary
Society provided a missionary and a catechist. Exeter Hall,
in a ferment, was for ever blocking up the gangway. At
last, on the 12th of May 1841, at half-past six in the morn-
ing, the line of battleships anchored in Plymouth Sound
gave three cheers to the Expedition as it steamed away,
unknowing, for 'the Gate of the Cemetery.' Such was the
sailors' name, thereafter, for the entrance to the fatal river
whither they were bound.
48 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
At Sierra Leone, in the middle of June following, the
interpreters were taken on board, together with some liber-
ated Africans, their wives and children, who were engaged
there by Mr. Carr, as labourers on the Model Farm. Also
a large gang of Krumen to assist in working the vessels, and
to save the white men as much as possible from exposure to
the sun and heavy rains. Of these negroes — a faithful,
cheerful, active, affectionate race — a very interesting ac-
count is given ; which seems to render it clear that they, under
civilised direction, are the only hopeful human agents to
whom recourse can ultimately be had for aid in working
out the slow and gradual raising up of Africa. Those
eminent Krumen, Jack Frying Pan, King George, Prince
Albert, Jack Sprat, Bottle-of-Beer, Tom Tea Kettle, the
Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and some four-score
others, enrolled themselves on the ships' books, here, under
Jack Andrews, their head man; and these being joined, at
Cape Palmas, by Jack Smoke, Captain Allen's faithful
servant and attendant in sickness in his former African
expedition, the complement was complete. Thence the
Expedition made for Cape Coast Castle, where much valua-
ble assistance was derived from Governor MacLean ; and
thence for the Nun branch of the Niger — the Gate of the
Cemetery.1
* Most English readers will be as unwilling as the manly writers of
these volumes, to leave one spot at Cape Coast Castle without a word
of remembrance.
'In passing across the square within the walls, an object of deep in-
terest presents itself in the little space containing all that was mortal
of the late Mrs. McLean; the once well-known, amiable, and accom-
plished. L. E. L. A plain marble slab, bearing the following inscrip-
tion, is placed over the spot:
Hie jacet sepultum,
Omne quod mortale fuit
LETITIJF. ELIZABETHS MCLEAN,
Quam egregia ornatam indole, Musis
Unice amatam. Omniumque amores
Secum trahentem; in ipso etatis flore,
Mors immatura rapuit.
Die Octobris xv., MDCCCXXXVIII. yKtatis xxxvi.
Quod spectas viator marmor vanum
Heu doloris monumentum
Conjux maerens erexit.
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 49
After a fortnight's voyage up the river the royal residence
of King Obi was reached. A solemn conference with this
sovereign was soon afterwards held on board the Albert.
His Majesty was dressed in a sergeant-major's coat, given
him by Lander, and a loose pair of scarlet trousers, pre-
sented to him on the same occasion, and a conical black
velvet cap was stuck on his head in a slanting manner. The
following extracts describe the process of
TREATY-MAKING WITH OBI.
On being shown to the after-part of the quarter-deck, where
seats were provided for himself and the Commissioners, he sat
down to collect his scattered ideas, which appeared to be some-
what bewildered; and after a few complimentary remarks from
Captain Trotter and the other Commissioners, the conference was
opened.
Captain Trotter, Senior Commissioner, explained to Obi Osai',
that her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain had sent him and
the three other gentlemen composing the Commission, to en-
deavour to enter into treaties with African chiefs for the aboli-
tion of the trade in human beings, which her Majesty and all
the British nation held to be an injustice to their fellow-creatures,
and repugnant to the laws of God ; that the vessels which he saw
were not trading-ships, but belonging to our Queen, and were
sent, at great expense, expressly to convey the Commissioners ap-
pointed by her Majesty, for the purpose of carrying out her
benevolent intentions, for the benefit of Africa. Captain Trotter
therefore requested the King to give a patient hearing to what
the Commissioners had to say to him on the subject.
Obi expressed 'himself through his interpreter, or 'mouth,'
much gratified at our visit; that he understood what was said,
and would pay attention.
The Commissioners then explained that the principal object in
inviting him to a conference was, to point out the injurious ef-
fects to himself and to his people of the practice of selling their
slaves, thus depriving themselves of their services for ever, for
'The beams of the setting sun throw a rich but subdued colouring over
the place, and as we stood in sad reflection on the fate of the gifted
poetess, some fine specimens of the Ilirundo Senegalensis, or African
swallow, fluttered gracefully about, as if to keep watch over a spot
sacred indeed to the Muses; while the noise of the surf, breaking on
the not distant shore, seemed to murmur a requiem over departed
genius.'
50 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
a trifling sum; whereas, if these slaves were kept at home, and
employed in the cultivation of the land, in collecting palm oil, or
other productions of the country for commerce, they would prove
a permanent source of revenue. Obi replied, that he was very
willing to do away with the slave-trade if a better traffic could
be substituted.
COMMISSIONERS. — Does Obi sell slaves from his own dominions ?
OBI. — No; they come from countries far away.
COMMISSIONERS. — Does Obi make war to procure slaves?
OBI. — When other chiefs quarrel with me and make war, I take
all I can as slaves.
COMMISSIONERS. — What articles 'of trade are best suited to your
people, or what would you like to be brought to your country?
OBI. — Cowries, cloth, muskets, powder, handkerchiefs, coral
beads, hats — anything from the white man's country will please.
COMMISSIONERS. — You are the King of this country, as our
Queen is the sovereign of Great Britain; but she does not wish
to trade with you; she only desires that her subjects may trade
fairly with yours. Would they buy salt?
OBI.— Yes.
COMMISSIONERS. — The Queen of England's subjects would be
glad to trade for raw cotton, indigo, ivory, gums, camwood.
Now have your people these things to offer in return for English
trade goods?
OBI.— Yes.
COMMISSIONERS. — Englishmen will bring everything to trade
but rum or spirits, which are injurious. If you induce your sub-
jects to cultivate the ground, you will all become rich; but if
you sell slaves, the land will not be cultivated, and you will be-
come poorer by the traffic. If you do all thes.e things which we
advise you for your own benefit, our Queen will grant you, for
your own profit and revenue, one out of every twenty articles sold
by British subjects in the Aboh territory; so that the more you
persuade your people to exchange native produce for British
goods, the richer you will become. You will then have a regular
profit, enforced by treaty, instead of trusting to a 'dash' or
present, which depends on the willingness of the traders.
OBI. — I will agree to discontinue the slave-trade, but I expect
the English to bring goods for traffic.
COMMISSIONERS. — The Queen's subjects cannot come here to
trade, unless they are certain of a proper supply of your produce.
OBI. — I have plenty of palm oil
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 51
COMMISSIONERS. — Mr. Schon, missionary, will explain to you in
the Ibu language what the Queen wishes, and if you do not
understand, it shall be repeated.
Mr. Schon began to read the address drawn up for the purpose
of showing the different tribes what the views of the Expedition
were; but Obi soon appeared to be tired of a palaver which
lasted so much longer than those to which he was accustomed.
He manifested some impatience, and at last said: 'I have made
you a promise to drop this slave-trade, and do not wish to hear
anything more about it.'
COMMISSIONERS. — Our Queen will be much pleased if you do,
and you will receive the presents which she sent for you. When
people in the white man's country sign a treaty or agreement,
they always abide by it. The Queen cannot come to speak to
you, Obi Osa'i, but she sends us to make the treaty for her.
OBI. — I can only engage my word for my own country.
COMMISSIONERS. — You cannot sell your slaves if you wish, for
our Queen has many warships at the mouth of the river, and
Spaniards are afraid to come and buy there.
OBI. — I understand.
He seemed to be highly amused on our describing the diffi-
culties the slave-dealers have to encounter in the prosecution of
the trade; and on one occasion he laughed immoderately when
told that our cruisers often captured slave-ships, with the cargo
on board. We suspected, however, that much of his amusement
arose from his knowing that slaves were shipped off at parts of
the coast little thought of by us. The abundance of Brazilian
rum in Aboh showed that they often traded with nations who
have avowedly no other obj ect.
It is not difficult to imagine that Obi was 'highly amused'
with the whole 'palaver,' except when the recollection of its
interposing between him and the presents made him restless.
For nobody knew better than Obi what a joke it all was, as
the result very plainly showed.
Some of the presents were now brought in, which Obi looked
at with evident pleasure. His anxiety to examine them com-
pleted his inattention to the rest of the palaver.
COMMISSIONERS. — These are not all the presents that will be
given to you. We wish to know if you are willing to stop boats
carrying slaves through the waters of your dominions?
OBI. — Yes, very willing; except those I do not see.
52 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
COMMISSIONERS. — Also to prevent slaves being carried over
your land?
OBI. — Certainly; but the English must furnish me and my peo-
ple with arms, as my doing so will involve me in war with my
neighbours.
Obi then retired for a short time to consult with his headmen.
COMMISSIONERS (on his return). — Have you power to make an
agreement with the Commissioners in the name of all your sub-
j ects ?
OBI. — I am the King. What I say is law. Are there two
Kings in England? There is only one here.
COMMISSIONERS. — Understanding you have sovereign power, can
you seize slaves on the river?
OBI.— Yes.
COMMISSIONERS. — You must set them free.
OBI. — Yes (snapping his fingers several times).
COMMISSIONERS. — The boats must be destroyed.
OBI. — I will break the canoe, but kill no one.
COMMISSIONERS. — Suppose a man of war takes a canoe, and it
is proved to be a slaver, the officer's word must be taken by the
King. You, Obi, or some one for you, can be present to see
justice done.
OBI. — I understand.
COMMISSIONERS. — Any new men coming henceforth to Aboh are
not to be made slaves.
OBI. — Very good.
COMMISSIONERS. — If any King, or other person, sends down
slaves, Obi must not buy them.
OBI. — I will not go to market to sell slaves.
COMMISSIONERS. — Any white men that are enslaved are to be
made free.
The Commissioners here alluded to the case of the Landers,
and asked Obi if he did not remember the circumstance of their
being detained some time as slaves. Obi, turning round to his
sons and headmen, appealed to them, and then denied all knowl-
edge of Lander's detention.
COMMISSIONERS. — British people who settle in Aboh must be
treated as friends, in the same way as Obi's subjects would be if
they were in England.
OBI. — What you say to me I will hold fast and perform.
COMMISSIONERS. — People may come here, and follow their own
religion without annoyance? Our countrymen will be happy to
teach our religion, without which blessing we should not be pros-
perous as a nation as we now are.
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 53
OBI. — Yes, let them come ; we shall be glad to hear them.
COMMISSIONERS. — British people may trade with your people;
but whenever it may be in Aboh, one-twentieth part of the goods
sold is to be given to the King. Are you pleased with this?
OBI. — Yes — 'makka.' — It is good (snapping his fingers).
COMMISSIONERS. — Is there any road from Aboh to Benin?
OBI. — Yes.
COMMISSIONERS. — They must all be open to the English.
OBI.— Yes.
COMMISSIONERS. — All the roads in England are open alike to
all foreigners.
OBI. — In this way of trade I am agreeable.
COMMISSIONERS. — Will Obi let the English build, cultivate, buy
and sell, without annoyance?
OBI. — Certainly.
COMMISSIONERS. — If your people do wrong to them, will you
punish them?
OBI. — They shall be judged, and if guilty, punished.
COMMISSIONERS. — When the English do wrong, Obi must send
word to an English officer, who will come and hold a palaver.
You must not punish white people.
OBI. — I assent to this. (He now became restless and im-
patient.)
COMMISSIONERS. — If your people contract debts with the Eng-
lish, they must be made to pay them.
OBI. — They shall be punished if they do not.
COMMISSIONERS. — The Queen may send an agent?
OBI. — If any Englishman comes to reside, I will show him
the best place to build a house and render him every assistance.
COMMISSIONERS. — Obi must also give every facility for for-
warding letters, etc., down the river, so that the English officer
who receives them may give a receipt, and also a reward for
sending them.
OBI. — Very good (snapping his fingers).
COMMISSIONERS. — Have you any opportunity of sending to
Bonny ?
OBI. — I have some misunderstanding with the people inter-
mediate between Aboh and Bonny; but I can do it through the
Brass people.
COMMISSIONERS. — Will you agree to supply men of war with
firewood, provisions, etc, etc., at a fair and reasonable price?
OBI. — Yes, certainly.
54 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The Commissioners requested Mr. Schon, the respected mis-
sionary, to state to King Obi, in a concise manner, the difference
between the Christian religion and heathenism, together with some
description of the settlement at Sierra Leone.
Ma. SCHON. — There is but one God.
OBI. — / always understood there were two.1
Mr. Schon recapitulated the Decalogue and the leading
truths of the Christian faith, and then asked Obi if this was
not a good religion, to which he replied, with a snap of his
fingers, 'Yes, very good' (makka).
Obi concluded the conference by remarking very emphat-
ically 'that he wanted this palaver settled; that he was tired
of so much talking, and that he wished to go on shore.' He
finally said, with great impatience, 'that this Slave Palaver
was all over now, and he didn't wish to hear anything more
of it.'
The upshot of the Slave Palaver was, that Obi agreed to
every article of the proposed treaty, and plighted his troth
to it then and there amidst a prodigious beating of tom-
toms, which lasted all night. Of course he broke the treaty
on the first opportunity (being one of the falsest rascals in
Africa), and went on slave-dealing vigorously. When the
expedition became helpless and disabled, newly captured
slaves, chained down to the bottom of canoes, were seen
passing along the river in the heart of this same Obi's
dominions.
The following is curious : —
OBI ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
28ffc. Agreeably to his promise, Obi Osai went on board the
Albert this morning, where he was received by Captain Trotter
and the Commissioners, with whom he breakfasted. His dress
was not so gay as on his visit of yesterday, being merely a cotton
j acket and trousers, much in want of a laundress, a red cap on his
head, and some strings of coral, and teeth of wild beasts, round
his neck, wrists, and ankles. He entered frankly into the views
previously explained to him, and assented unhesitatingly to all
i Some former traveller — Lander, perhaps — had possibly bewildered
Obi with the Athanasian Creed.
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 55
required from him. It was, however, necessary that the Treaty,
which had been drawn upon the basis of the draft furnished
by Lord John Russell, with the addition of some articles re-
lating especially to the free navigation of the river, should be
again read and explained to Obi and his principal headmen, es-
pecially the heir-presumptive and the chief Ju-juman, much to
their annoyance; and as all this occupied a long while, appar-
ently to very little purpose, he completely turned against our-
selves the charge we made against the black people — of not
knowing the value of time. In agreeing to the additional article,
binding the Chief and his people to the discontinuance of the
horrid custom of sacrificing human beings, Obi very reasonably
inquired what should be done with those who might deserve death
as punishment for the commission of great crimes.
Something very like this question of Obi's has been asked,
once or twice, by the very Government which sent out these
'devil-ships,' or steamers, to remodel his affairs for him; and
the point has not been settled yet.
Now let us review this Diplomacy for a moment. Obi,
though a savage in a sergeant-major's coat, may claim with
Master Slender, and perhaps with better reason, to be not
altogether an ass. Obi knows, to begin with, that the Eng-
lish Government maintains a blockade, the object of which is
to prevent the exportation of slaves from his native coasts,
and which is inefficient and absurd. The very mention of it
sets him a-laughing. Obi, sitting on the quarter-deck of
the Albert, looking slyly out from under his savage forehead
and his conical cap, sees before him her Majesty's white
Commissioners from the distant blockade-country gravely
propounding, at one sitting, a change in the character of
his people (formed, essentially, in the inscrutable wisdom
of God, by the soil they work on and the air they breathe) —
the substitution of a religion it is utterly impossible he can
appreciate or understand, be the mutual interpretation never
so exact and never so miraculously free from confusion, for
that in which he has been bred, and with which his priest
and jugglers subdue his subjects, the entire subversion of
his whole barbarous system of trade and revenue — and the
uprooting, in a word, of all his, and his nation's, precon-
ceived ideas, methods, and customs. In return for this, the
56 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
white men are to trade with him by means of ships that are
to come there one day or other ; and are to quell infractions of
the treaty by means of other white men, who are to learn how
to draw the breath of life there, by some strong charm they
certainly have not discovered yet. Can it be supposed that
on this earth there lives a man who better knows than Obi,
leering round upon the river's banks, the dull dead man-
grove trees, the slimy and decaying earth, the rotting vegeta-
tion, that these are shadowy promises and shadowy threats,
which he may give to the hot winds? In any breast in the
white group about him, is there a dark presentiment of
death (the pestilential air is heavier already with such
whispers, to some noble hearts) half so certain as this sav-
age's foreknowledge of the fate fast closing in? In the
mind's eye of any officer or seaman looking on, is there a
picture of the bones of white men bleaching in a pestilential
land, and of the timbers of their poor, abandoned, pillaged
ships, showing, on the shore, like gigantic skeletons, half so
vivid as Obi's? 'Too much palaver,' says Obi, with good
reason. 'Give me the presents and let me go home, and beat
my tom-toms all night long for joy !'
Yet these were the means by which the African people
were to be awakened to a proper sense of their own degrada-
tion. For the conclusion of such treaties with such powers,
the useful lives of scholars, students, mariners, and officers —
more precious than a wilderness of Africans — were thrown
away !
There was another monarch at another place on the Niger,
a certain Attah of Iddah, 'whose feet, enclosed in very large
red leather boots, surrounded with little bells, dangled care-
lessly over the side of the throne,5 who spoke through a State
functionary, called the King's mouth, and who had this very
orthodox notion of the Divine right: 'God made me after His
image; I am all the same as God; and He appointed me a
King.' With this good old sovereign a similar scene was
enacted; and he, too, promised everything that was asked,
and was particularly importunate to see the presents. He
also was very much amused by the missionary's spectacles,
it was supposed ; and as royalty in these parts must not smile
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 57
in public, the fan-bearers found it necessary to hide his face
very often. The Attah dines alone — like the Pope — and is
equally infallible. Some land for the Model Farm" was pur-
chased of him, and the settlement established. The reading
of the deed was very patiently attended to, 'unless,' say the
writers of these volumes, with the frankness which distin-
guishes them — 'unless we mistook apathy for such a laud-
able bearing.'
So much is done towards the great awakening of the
African people. By this time the Expedition has been in
the river five weeks ; fever has appeared on board of all the
ships in the river; for the last three days especially it has
progressed with terrible rapidity. On board the Soudan
only six persons can move about. On board the Albert the
assistant surgeon lies at the point of death. On board the
Wilberforce several are nearly at the same pass. Another
day, and sixty in all are sick, and thirteen dead. 'Nothing but
muttering delirium or suppressed groans are heard on every
side on board the vessels.' Energy of character and strength
of hope are lost, even among those not yet attacked. One
officer, remarkable for fortitude and resignation, burst into
tears on being addressed, and being asked the reason, replies
that it is involuntary weakness produced by the climate;
though it afterwards appears that, 'in addition to this cause,
he has been disheartened, during a little repose snatched from
his duties, by a feverish dream of home and family.' An anx-
ious consultation is held. Captain Trotter decides to send
the sick back to the sea, in the Soudan, but Captain Allen
knows the river will begin to fall straightway, and that the
most unhealthy season will set in, and places his opinion on
record that the ships had better all return, and make no
further effort at that time to ascend the river.
DEPARTURE OF THE SICK
The Soudan was accordingly got ready with the utmost pos-
sible despatch to receive her melancholy cargo, and Commander
W. Allen was directed to send his sick on board. That officer,
however, feeling perfectly convinced from his former experience
of the river, that in a very short time H.M.S. Wilberforce would
58 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
be reduced to the necessity of following the Soudan, requested
permission to send such only of the sick as might desire to go;
especially as he considered— in which his surgeon, Dr. Pritchett,
concurred — that the removal of the men in the state in which
they were would be attended with great risk. Only six expressed
a Wish to leave; the others, sixteen in number, preferred to re-
main by their ship. One man, on being asked whether he would
like to go, said he thought we had got into a very bad place,
and the sooner we were out of it the better, but he would stay by
Ms ship.
In order to have as much air as possible for the sufferers, and
to keep them from the other men, Commander W. Allen had a
large screened berth fitted on the upper deck, in the middle of
the vessel, well protected from the sun and the dews at night, by
thick awnings, from which was suspended a large punkah.
Sunday, iQih. — The Soudan came alongside the Wilber force to
receive our invalids, who took a melancholy farewell of their
officers and messmates.
Prayers were read to the crews of both vessels. It was an
affecting scene. The whole of one side of the little vessel was
covered with invalids, and the cabins were full of officers; there
was, indeed, no room for more.
•The separation from so many of our companions under such
circumstances could not be otherwise than painful to all; — the
only cheering feature was in the hope that the attenuated beings
who now departed would soon be within the influence of a more
favourable climate, and that we might meet under happier aus-
pices.
In a short time the steam was got up, and onr little consort —
watched by many commiserating eyes — rapidly glided out of view.
Only two or three days have elapsed since this change was
effected, and now the Wilberforce has thirty-two men sick
of the fever, leaving only thirteen, officers and seamen, capa-
ble of duty. She, too, returns to the sea, on Captain Allen's
renewed protest and another council; and the Albert goes on
up the melancholy river alone.
THE 'WILBERFORCE' ON HER RETURN
We proceeded through these narrow and winding reaches with
feelings very different to those we experienced in ascending thft
river. Then the elasticity of health and hope gave to the scenery
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 59
a colouring of exceeding loveliness. The very silence and soli-
tude had a soothing influence which invited to meditation and
pleasing anticipations for the future. Now it was the stillness
of death, — broken only by the strokes and echoes of our paddle-
wheels and the melancholy song of the leadsmen, which seemed
the knell and dirge of our dying comrades. The palm-trees,
erst so graceful in their drooping leaves, were now gigantic
hearse-like plumes.
So she drops down to Fernando Po, where the Soudan is
lying, on whose small and crowded decks death has been, and is
still, busy. Commanding-officer, surgeons, seamen, engineers,
marines, all sick, many dead. Captain Allen, with the sick
on board the Wilberforce, sails for Ascension, as a last hope
of restoring the sick ; and the Soudan is sent back to assist
the Albert. She meets her coming out of the Gate of the
Cemetery ; thus :
THE 'ALBERT' ON HER RETURN
It was a lovely morning, and the scenery about the river looked
very beautiful, affording a sad contrast to the dingy and deserted
look of the Albert.
Many were, of course, the painful surmises as to the fate of
those on board. On approaching, however, the melancholy truth
was soon told. The fever had been doing its direst work; several
were dead, many dying, and of all the officers, but two, Drs.
McWilliam and Stanger, were able to move about. The former
presented himself and waved his hand, and one emaciated figure
was seen to be raised up for a second. This was Captain Trot-
ter, who in his anxiety to look at the Soudan again, had been
lifted out of his cot.
A spectacle more full of painful contemplation could scarcely
have been witnessed. Slowly and portentously, like a plague-
ship filled with its dead and dying, onwards she moved in
charge of her generous pilot, Mr. Beecroft. Who would have
thought that little more than two months previously she had en-
tered that same river with an enterprising crew, full of life,
and buoyant with bright hopes of accomplishing the objects on
which all had so ardently entered?
The narrative of the Albert's solitary voyage, which occu-
60 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
pied about a month, is given from the journal of Dr.
McWilliam, and furnishes, to our thinking, one of the most
remarkable instances of quiet courage and unflinching con-
stancy of purpose that is to be found in any book of travel
ever written. The sickness spreading, Captain Trotter fall-
ing very ill, officers, engineers, and men lying alike disabled,
and the Albert's head turned, in the necessity of despair,
once more towards the sea, the two doctors on board, Dr.
McWilliam and Dr. Stanger — names that should ever be
memorable and honoured in the history of truly heroic enter-
prise— took upon themselves, in addition to the duty of
attending the sick, the task of navigating the ship down the
river. The former took charge of her, the latter worked
the engines, and, both persevering by day and night — •
through all the horrors of such a voyage, with their friends
raving and dying around them, and some, in the madness of
the fever, leaping overboard — brought her in safety to the
sea. We would fain hope this feat would live, in Dr. Mc-
William's few, plain, and modest words ; and, better yet, in
the grateful remembrance handed down by the survivors of
this fatal expedition; when the desperate and cruel of whole
generations of the world shall have fallen into oblivion.
Calling at the Model Farm as they came down the Niger,
they found the superintendent, Mr. Carr, and the school-
master and gardener — both Europeans — lying prostrate with
fever. These were taken on board the Albert and brought
away for the restoration of their health ; and the settlement — •
now mustering about forty natives, in addition to the people
brought from Sierra Leone — was left in the charge of one
Ralph Moore, an American negro emigrant.
The rest of the sad story is soon told. The sea-breeze
blew too late on many wasted forms, to shed its freshness on
them for their restoration, and Death, Death, Death was
aboard the Albert day and night. Captain Trotter, as the
only means of saving his life, was with difficulty prevailed
on to return to England ; and after a long delay at Ascen-
sion and in the Bay of Amboises (in the absence of instruc-
tions from the Colonial Office), and when the Expedition,
under Captain Allen, was on the eve of another hopeless at-
THE NIGER EXPEDITION 61
tempt to ascend the Niger, it was ordered home. It being
necessary to revisit the Model Farm, in obedience to orders,
Lieutenant Webb, Captain Allen's first officer, immediately
volunteered for that service ; and with the requisite number of
officers, and a black crew, took command of the Wilberforce,
and once again went boldly up the fatal Niger. Disunion and
dismay were rife at the Model Farm, on their arrival there ;
Mr. Carr, who had returned from Fernando Po when re-
stored to health, had been murdered — by direction of 'King
Boy,' it would appear, and not without strong suspicion
of co-operation on the part of our friend Obi — and the
settlement was abandoned. Obi (though he is somewhat
unaccountably complimented by Dr. McWilliam) came out in
his true colours on the Wilberforce's return, and, not being
by any means awakened to a proper sense of his own degrada-
tion, appears to have evinced an amiable intention of de-
stroying the crew and seizing the ship. Being baffled in
this design, however, by the coolness and promptitude of
Lieutenant Webb and his officers, the white men happily left
him behind in his own country, where he is no doubt ready
at this moment, if still alive, to enter into any treaty that
may be proposed to him, with presents to follow ; and to be
highly amused again on the subject of the slave-trade, and
to beat his tom-toms all night long for joy.
The fever, which wrought such terrible desolation in this
and the preceding Expedition, becomes a subject of painful in-
terest to the readers of these volumes. The length to which our
notice has already extended, prevents our extracting, as we
had purposed, the account of it which is given in the pres-
ent narrative. Of the predisposing causes, little can be
positively stated; for the most delicate chemical tests failed
to detect, in the air or water, the presence of those deleterious
gases which were very confidently supposed to exist in both.
It is preceded either by a state of great prostration, or great
excitement, and unnatural indifference ; it develops itself on
board ship about the fifteenth day after the ascent of the
river is commenced; a close and sultry atmosphere without
any breeze stirring, is the atmosphere most unfavourable to
it; it appears to yield to calomel in the first instance, and
62 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
strong doses of quinine afterwards, more than to any other
remedies ; and it is remarkable that in cases of 'total absti-
nence' patients, it seems from the first to be hopelessly and
surely fatal.
The history of this Expedition is the history of the Past,
in reference to the heated visions of philanthropists for the
railroad Christianisation of Africa, and the abolition of the
Slave-Trade. May no popular cry, from Exeter Hall or
elsewhere, ever make it, as to one single ship, the history of
the Future 1 Such means are useless, futile, and we will ven-
ture to add— in despite of hats broad-brimmed or shovel-
shaped, and coats of drab or black, with collars or without —
wicked. No amount of philanthropy has a right to waste
such valuable life as was squandered here, in the teeth of all
experience and feasible pretence of hope. Between the civ-
ilised European and the barbarous African there is a great
gulf set.
The air that brings life to the latter brings death to the
former. In the mighty revolutions of the wheel of time, some
change in this regard may come about ; but in this age of
the world, all the white armies and white missionaries of the
world would fall, as withered reeds, before the rolling of one
African river. To change the customs even of civilised and
educated men, and impress them with new ideas, is — we have
good need to know it — a most difficult and slow proceeding ;
but to do this by ignorant and savage races, is a work which,
like the progressive changes of the globe itself, requires a
stretch of years that dazzles in the looking at. It is not, we
conceive, within the likely providence of God, that Christianity
shall start to the banks of the Niger, until it shall have over-
flowed all intervening space. The stone that is dropped
into the ocean of ignorance at Exeter Hall, must make its
widening circles, one beyond another, until they reach the
negro's country in their natural expansion. There is a
broad, dark sea between the Strand in London and the Niger,
where those rings are not yet shining; and through all that
space they must appear, before the last one breaks upon the
shore of Africa. Gently and imperceptibly the widening
circle of enlightenment must stretch and stretch, from man to
THE XIGER EXPEDITION 63
man, from people on to people, until there is a girdle roun<?
the earth ; but no convulsive effort, or far-off aim, can make
the last great outer circle first, and then come home at leisure
to trace out the inner one. Believe it, African Civilisation,
Church of England Missionary, and all other Missionary
Societies ! The work at home must be completed thor-
oughly, or there is no hope abroad. To your tents, O Israel !
but see they are your own tents ! Set them in order ; leave
nothing to be done there; and outpost will convey your lesson
on to outpost, until the naked armies of King Obi and King
Boy are reached and taught. Let a knowledge of the duty
that man owes to man, and to his God, spread thus, by nat-
ural degrees and growth of example, to the outer shores of
Africa, and it will float in safety up the rivers, never fear !
We will not do injustice to Captain Allen's scheme of
future operations, by reproducing it, shorn of its fair pro-
portions. As a most distinguished officer and a highly ac-
complished gentleman, than whom there is no one living so
well entitled to be heard on all that relates to Africa, it
merits, and assuredly will receive, great attention. We are
not, on the ground we have just now indicated, so sanguine
as he ; but there is sound wisdom in his idea of approaching
the black man through the black man, and in his conviction
that he can only be successfully approached by a studied
reference to the current of his own opinions and customs
instead of ours. So true is this, that it is doubtful whether
any European save Bruce — who had a perfectly marvellous
genius for accommodating himself, not only to the African
character, but to every variety of character with which he
came in contact — has ever truly won to himself a mingled
sentiment of confidence, respect, and fear in that country.
So little has our government profited by his example, that
one of the foremost objects of this very Expedition is to
repeat the self-same mistake with which Clapperton so as-
tonished the King Boy and King Obi of his time, by running
head foremost at the abolition of the Slave-Trade ; which,
of all possible objects, is the most inconceivable, unpala-
table, and astounding to these barbarians !
Captain Allen need be under no apprehension that the
64 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
failure of the Expedition will involve his readers in any con-
fusion as to the sufferings and deserts of those who sacrificed
themselves to achieve its unattainable objects. No generous
mind can peruse this narrative without a glow of admiration
and sympathy for himself and all concerned. The quiet
spot by Lander's tomb, lying beyond the paths of guava
and the dark-leaved trees, where old companions dear to his
heart lie buried side by side beneath the sombre and almost
impenetrable brushwood, is not to be ungratefully remem-
bered, or lightly forgotten. Though the African is not yet
awakened to a proper sense of his degradation, the resting-
place of those brave men is sacred, and their history a solemn
truth.
THE POETRY OF SCIENCE
[DECEMBER 9, 1848]
JUDGING from certain indications scattered here and there
in this book,1 we presume that its author would not consider
himself complimented by the remark that we are perhaps
indebted for the publication of such a work to the author of
the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, who, by
rendering the general subject popular, and awakening an
interest and spirit of inquiry in many minds, where these had
previously lain dormant, has created a reading public — not
exclusively scientific or philosophical — to whom such offer-
ings can be hopefully addressed. This, however, we believe
to be the case ; and in this, as we conceive, the writer of that
remarkable and well-abused book has not rendered his least
important service to his own time.
The design of Mr. Hunt's volume is striking and good.
To show that the facts of science are at least as full of
poetry, as the most poetical fancies ever founded on an im-
perfect observation and a distant suspicion of them (as, for
example, among the ancient Greeks); to show that if the
i The Poetry of Science, or Studies of the Physical Phenomena of
Nature. By Robert Hunt. Reeve, Benham, and Reeve.
THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 65
Dryades no longer haunt the woods, there is, in every forest,
in every tree, in every leaf, and in every ring on every sturdy
trunk, a beautiful and wonderful creation, always chang-
ing, always going on, always bearing testimony to the stu-
pendous workings of Almighty Wisdom, and always leading
the student's mind from wonder on to wonder, until he is
wrapt and lost in the vast worlds of wonder by which he is
surrounded from his cradle to his grave ; it is a purpose
worthy of the natural philosopher, and salutary to the spirit
of the age. To show that Science, truly expounding Nature,
can, like Nature herself, restore in some new form whatever
she destroys ; that, instead of binding us, as some would have
it, in stern utilitarian chains, when she has freed us from a
harmless superstition, she offers to our contemplation some-
thing better and more beautiful, something which, rightly
considered, is more elevating to the soul, nobler and more
stimulating to the soaring fancy ; is a sound, wise, whole-
some object. If more of the learned men who have written
on these themes had had it in their minds, they would have
done more good, and gathered upon their track many fol-
lowers on whom its feeblest and most distant trace has only
now begun to shine.
Science has gone down into the mines and coal-pits, and
before the safety-lamp the Gnomes and Genii of those dark
regions have disappeared. But in their stead, the process
by which metals are engendered in the course of ages ; the
growth of plants which, hundreds of fathoms underground,
and in black darkness, have still a sense of the sun's pres-
ence in the sky, and derive some portion of the subtle essence
of their life from his influence ; the histories of mighty
forests and great tracts of land carried down into the sea, by
the same process which is active in the Mississippi and such
great rivers at this hour; are made familiar to us. Sirens,
mermaids, shining cities glittering at the bottom of the quiet
seas and in deep lakes, exist no longer; but in their place,
Science, their destroyer, shows us whole coasts of coral reef
constructed by the labours of minute creatures, points to our
own chalk cliffs and limestone rocks as made of the dust of
myriads of generations of infinitesimal beings that have
66 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
passed away; reduces the very element of water into its con-
stituent airs, and re-creates it at her pleasure. Caverns in
rocks, choked with rich treasures shut up from all but the
enchanted hand, Science has blown to atoms, as she can rend
and rive the rocks themselves ; but in those rocks she has
found, and read aloud, the great stone book which is the
history of the earth, even when darkness sat upon the face
of the deep. Along their craggy sides she has traced the
footprints of birds and beasts, whose shapes were never seen
by man. From within them she has brought the bones, and
pieced together the skeletons, of monsters that would have
crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow. The stars
that stud the firmament by night are watched no more from
lonely towers by enthusiasts or impostors, believing, or feign-
ing to believe, those great worlds to be charged with the
small destinies of individual men down here; but two astron-
omers, far apart, each looking from his solitary study up into
the sky, observe, in a known star, a trembling which fore-
warns them of the coming of some unknown body through the
realms of space, whose attraction at a certain period of its
mighty journey causes that disturbance. In due time it
comes, and passes out of the disturbing path; the old star
shines at peace again ; and the new one, evermore to be asso-
ciated with the honoured names of Le Verrier and Adams,
is called Neptune! The astrologer has faded out of the
castle turret-room (which overlooks a railroad now), and
forebodes no longer that because the light of yonder planet
is diminishing, my lord will shortly die; but the professor of
an exact science has arisen in his stead, to prove that a ray of
light must occupy a period of six years in travelling to the
earth from the nearest of the fixed stars ; and that if one of
the remote fixed stars were 'blotted out. of heaven' to-day,
several generations of the mortal inhabitants of this earth
must perish out of time, before the fact of its obliteration
could be known to man !
This ample compensation, in respect of poetry alone, that
Science has given us in return for what she has taken away,
it is the main object of Mr. Hunt's book to elucidate. The
subject is very ably dealt with, and the object very well at-
THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 67
tained. We might object to an occasional discursiveness, and
sometimes we could have desired to be addressed in a plainer
form of words. Nor do we quite perceive the force of Mr.
Hunt's objection (at p. 307) to certain geological specu-
lations ; which we must be permitted to believe many intel-
ligent men to be capable of making, and reasonably sus-
taining, on a knowledge of certain geological facts ; albeit
they are neither practical chemists nor palaeontologists. But
the book displays a fund of knowledge, and is the work of an
eloquent and earnest man ; and, as such, we are too content
and happy to receive it, to enlarge on these points. We
subjoin a few extracts.
HOW WE 'COME LIKE SHADOWS, so DEPART
A plant exposed to the action of natural or artificial decompo-
sition passes into air, leaving but a few grains of solid matter
behind it. An animal, in like manner, is gradually resolved into
'thin air.' Muscle, and blood, and bones having undergone the
change, are found to have escaped as gases, 'leaving only a pinch
of dust,' which belongs to the more stable mineral world. Our
dependency on the atmosphere is therefore evident. We derive
our substance from it — we are, after death, resolved again into it.
We are really but fleeting shadows. Animal and vegetable forms
are little more than consolidated masses of the atmosphere. The
sublime creations of the most gifted bard cannot rival the beauty
of this, the highest and the truest poetry of science. Man has
divined such changes by the unaided powers of reason, arguing
from the phenomena which Science reveals in unceasing action
around him. The Grecian sage's doubts of his own identity was
only an extension of a great truth beyond the limits of our
reason. Romance and superstition resolve the spiritual man into
a visible form of extreme ethereality in the spectral creations,
'clothed in their own horror,' by which their reigns have been
perpetuated.
When Shakespeare made his charming Ariel sing —
'Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But dotn suffer a sea-change,
Into something rich and strange';
68
he little thought how correctly he painted the chemical changes,
by which decomposing animal matter is replaced by a siliceous
or calcareous formation.
Why Mr. Hunt should be of opinion that Shakespeare
'little thought' how wise he was, we do not altogether under-
stand. Perhaps he founds the supposition on Shakespeare's
not having been recognized as a practical chemist or palaeon-
tologist.
We conclude with the following passage, which seems to us
strikingly suggestive of the shortness and hurry of our little
life which is rounded with a sleep, and the calm majesty of
Nature.
RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TIME TO MAN AND NATURE
All things on the earth are the result of chemical combination
The operation by which the commingling of molecules and the
interchange of atoms take place, we can imitate in our labora-
tories; but in Nature they proceed by slow degrees, and, in gen-
eral, in our hands they are distinguished by suddenness of action.
In Nature chemical power is distributed over a long period of
time, and the process of change is scarcely to be observed. By
arts we concentrate chemical force, and expend it in producing a
change which occupies but a few hours at most.
[DECEMBER 16, 1848]
A VERY extraordinary exhibition is open at the Egyptian
Hall, Piccadilly, under the title of 'Banvard's Geographical
Panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.' With one
or two exceptions, its remarkable claims to public notice seem
scarcely to have been recognised as they deserve. We rec-
ommend them to the consideration of all holiday-makers and
sight-seers this Christmas.
It may be well to say what the panorama is not. It is
not a refined work of art (nor does it claim to be, in Mr.
Banvard's modest description ) ; it is not remarkable for ac-
curacy of drawing, or for brilliancy of color, or for subtle
effects of light and shade, or for any approach to any of the
qualities of those delicate and beautiful pictures by Mr.
Stanfield which used, once upon a time, to pass before our
eyes in like manner. It is not very skilfully set off by the
disposition of the artificial light ; it is not assisted by anything
but a pianoforte and a seraphine.
But it is a picture three miles long, which occupies two
hours in its passage before the audience. It is a picture of
one of the greatest streams in the known world, whose course
it follows for upwards of three thousand miles. It is a pic-
ture irresistibly impressing the spectator with a conviction
of its plain and simple truthfulness, even though that were
not guaranteed by the best testimonials. It is an easy means
of travelling, night and day, without any inconvenience
from climate, steamboat company, or fatigue, from New
Orleans to the Yellow Stone Bluffs (or from the Yellow Stone
Bluffs to New Orleans, as the case may be), and seeing every
town and settlement upon the river's banks, and all the
strange wild ways of life that are afloat upon its waters. To
see this painting is, in a word, to have a thorough under-
standing of what the great American river is — except, we
believe, in the colour of its water — and to acquire a new
power of testing the descriptive accuracy of its best de-
scribers.
These three miles of canvas have been painted by one man,
and there he is, present, pointing out what he deems most
worthy of notice. This is history. Poor, untaught, wholly
unassisted, he conceives the idea — a truly American idea — of
painting 'the largest picture in the world.' Some capital
must be got for the materials, and the acquisition of that is
his primary object. First, he starts 'a floating diorama' on
the Wabash river, which topples over when people come to
see it, and keeps all the company at the pumps for dear life.
This entertainment drawing more water than money, and
being set upon, besides, by robbers armed with bowie knives
and rifles, is abandoned. Then he paints a panorama of
Venice, and exhibits it in the West successfully, until it goes
down in a steamer on the Western waters. Then he sets up
a museum at St. Louis, which fails. Then he comes down to
70 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Cincinnati, where he does no better. Then, without a far-
thing, he rows away on the Ohio in a small boat, and lives,
like a wild man, upon nuts ; until he sells a revolving pistol
which cost him twelve dollars, for five-and-twenty. With the
proceeds of this commercial transaction he buys a larger
boat, lays in a little store of calicoes and cottons, and rows
away again among the solitary settlers along-shore, barter-
ing his goods for bee's wax. Thus, in course of time, he
earns enough to buy a little skiff, and go to work upon the
largest picture in the world !
In his little skiff he travels thousands of miles, with no
companions but his pencil, rifle and dog, making the pre-
paratory sketches for the largest picture in the world. Those
completed, he erects a temporary building at Louisville, Ken-
tucky, in which to paint the largest picture in the world.
Without the least help, even in the grinding of his colours
or the splitting of the wood for his machinery, he falls to
work, and keeps at work ; maintaining himself meanwhile, and
buying more colours, wood, and canvas, by doing odd jobs
in the decorative way. At last he finishes the largest picture
in the world, and opens it for exhibition on a stormy night,
when not a single 'human' comes to see it. Not discouraged
yet, he goes about among the boatmen, who are well ac-
quainted with the river, and gives them free admissions to
the largest picture in the world. The boatmen come to see
it, are astonished at it, talk about it. 'Our country' wakes up
from a rather sullen doze at Louisville, and comes to see it too.
The upshot is, that it succeeds ; and here it is in London, with
its painter standing on a little platform by its side explain-
ing it ; and probably, by this time next year, it and he may
be in Timbuctoo.
Few can fail to have some interest in such an adventure
and in such an adventurer, and they will both repay it amply.
There is c, mixture of shrewdness and simplicity in the latter,
which is very prepossessing; a modesty, and honesty, and an
odd original humour, in his manner of telling what he has to
tell, that give it a peculiar relish. The picture itself, as an
indisputably true and faithful representation of a wonderful
region — wood and water, river and prairie, lonely log hut
JUDICIAL SPECIAL PLEADING 71
and clustered city rising in the forest — is replete with inter-
est throughout. Its incidental revelations of the different
states of society, yet in transition, prevailing at different
points of these three thousand miles — slaves and free republi-
cans, French and Southerners; immigrants from abroad, and
restless Yankees and Down-Easters ever steaming somewhere ;
alligators, store-boats, show-boats, theatre-boats, Indians,
buffaloes, deserted tents of extinct tribes, and bodies of dead
Braves, with their pale faces turned up to the night sky,
lying still and solitary in the wilderness, nearer and nearer to
which the outposts of civilisation are approaching with gi-
gantic strides to tread their people down, and erase their
very track from the earth's face — teem with suggestive
matter. We are not disposed to think less kindly of a
country when we see so much of it, although our sense of its
immense responsibility may be increased.
It would be well to have a panorama, three miles long, of
England. There might be places in it worth looking at, a
little closer than we see them now ; and worth the thinking
of, a little more profoundly. It would be hopeful, too, to
see some things in England, part and parcel of a moving
panorama ; and not of one that stood still, or had a disposi-
tion to go backward.
JUDICIAL SPECIAL PLEADING
[DECEMBER 23, 1848]
IT is unnecessary for us to observe that we have not the least
sympathy with physical-force chartism in the abstract, or
with the tried and convicted physical-force chartists in par-
ticular. Apart from the atrocious designs to which these
men, beyond all question, willingly and easily subscribed,
even if it be granted that such extremes of wickedness were
mainly suggested by the spies in whom their dense ignorance
confided, they have done too much damage to the cause of
rational liberty and freedom all over the world to be regarded
72 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
in any other light than as enemies of the common weal, and
the worst foes of the common people.
But, for all this, we would have the language of common-
sense and knowledge addressed to these offenders — especially
from the Bench. They need it very much ; and besides that
the truth should be spoken at all times, it is desirable that it
should always appear in conjunction with the gravity and
authority of the judicial ermine.
Mr. Baron Alderson, we regret to observe, opened the late
special commission for the county of Chester with a kind of
judicial special-constableism by no means edifying. In
sporting phrase, he 'went in' upon the general subject of
Revolution with a determination to win ; and as nothing is
easier than for a man, wigged or unwigged, to say what he
pleases when he has all the talk to himself and there is nobody
to answer him, he improved the occasion after a somewhat
startling manner. It is important that it should not be left
wholly unnoticed. On Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff's magic ther-
mometer, at his apartment in Shoe Lane, the Church was
placed between zeal and moderation ; and Mr. Bickerstaff ob-
served that if the enchanted liquor rose from the central
point, Church, too high in zeal, it was in danger of going
up to wrath, and from wrath to persecution. The substi-
tution of 'Bench' for 'Church' by the wise old censor of
Great Britain, would no doubt have been attended with the
same result.
Mr. Baron Alderson informed the grand jury, for their
edification, that 'previous to the Revolution in France, of
1790, the physical comforts possessed by the poor greatly
exceeded those possessed by them subsequent to that event.'
Before we pass to Mr. Baron Alderson's proof in support of
this allegation, we would inquire whether, at this time of day,
any rational man supposes that the first Revolution in France
was an event that could have been avoided, or that is difficult
to be accounted for, on looking back? Whether it was not
the horrible catastrophe of a drama, which had already
passed through every scene and shade of progress, inevitably
leading on to that fearful conclusion? Whether there is
JUDICIAL SPECIAL PLEADING 73
any record, in the world's history, of a people among whom
the arts and sciences, and the refinements of civilised life ex-
isted, so oppressed, degraded, and utterly miserable, as the
mass of the French population were before that Revolution?
Physical comforts! No such thing was known among the
French people — among the people — for years before the Rev-
olution. They had died of sheer want and famine, in num-
bers. The hunting-trains of their kings had ridden over
their bodies in the royal forests. Multitudes had gone about,
crying and howling for bread, in the streets of Paris. The
line of road from Versailles to the capital had been blocked
up by starvation and nakedness pouring in from the depart-
ments. The tables spread by Egalite Orleans in the public
streets had been besieged by the foremost stragglers of a
whole nation of paupers, on the face of every one of whom
the shadow of the coming guillotine was black. An infa-
mous feudality and a corrupt government had plundered and
ground them down, year after year, until they were reduced
to a condition of distress which has no parallel. As their
wretchedness deepened, the wantonness and luxury of their
oppressors heightened, until the very fashions and customs
of the upper classes ran mad from being unrestrained, and
became monstrous.
'All,' says Thiers, 'was monopolised by a few hands, and
the burdens bore upon a single class. The nobility and the
clergy possessed nearly two-thirds of the landed property.
The other third, belonging to the people, paid taxes to the
king, a multitude of feudal dues to the nobility, the tithe to
the clergy, and was, moreover, liable to the devastations of
noble sportsmen and their game. The taxes on consump-
tion weighed heavily on the great mass, and consequently on
the people. The mode in which they were levied was vex-
atious. The gentry might be in arrear with impunity ; the
people, on the other hand, ill-treated and imprisoned, were
doomed to suffer in body, in default of goods. They de-
fended with their blood the upper classes of society, without
being able to subsist themselves.'
Bad as the state of things was which succeeded to the Rev-
74 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
olution, and must always follow any such dire convulsion, if
there be anything in history that is certain, it is certain that
the French people had NO physical comforts when the Revo-
lution occurred. And when Mr. Baron Alderson talks to the
grand jury of that Revolution being a mere struggle for
'political rights,' he talks (with due submission to him)
nonsense, and loses an opportunity of pointing his discourse
to the instruction of the chartists. It was a struggle on
the part of the people for social recognition and existence.
It was a struggle for vengeance against intolerable oppres-
sors. It was a struggle for the overthrow of a system of
oppression, which in its contempt of all humanity, decency,
and natural rights, and in its systematic degradation of the
people, had trained them to be the demons that they showed
themselves, when they rose up and cast it down for ever.
Mr. Baron Alderson's proof of his position would be a
strange one, by whomsoever addressed, but is an especially
strange one to be put forward by a high functionary, one of
whose most important duties is the examination and sifting
of evidence, with a view to its being better understood by
minds unaccustomed to such investigations.
'It had been assumed, on very competent authority, that the
physical comforts of the poor might be safely judged of by the
quantity of meat consumed by the population ; and, taking this
as the criterion, the statistics of Paris gave the following results:
In 1789, during the period of the old monarchy, the quantity of
meat consumed was 147 Ibs. per man; in 1817, after the Bourbon
dynasty had been restored to the throne, subsequent to the Revo-
lution, it was 110 Ibs. 2 ozs. per man; and in 1827, the medium
period between the restoration of the Bourbons and the present
time, the average was still about 110 Ibs.; while, after the Revo-
lution of 1830, it fell to 98 Ibs. llozs., and at this period it
was in all probability still less.'
The statistics, of Paris, in 1789! When the Court, dis-
playing extraordinary magnificence, was in Paris ; when the
three orders, all the great dignitaries of the State, and all
their immense train of followers and dependants, were in
Paris ; when the aristocracy, making their last effort at
accommodation with the king, were in Paris, and remained
JUDICIAL SPECIAL PLEADING 75
there until the close of the year; when there was the great
procession to the church of Notre Dame, in Paris; when the
opening of the States-General took place, in Paris; when
the Commons constituted themselves the National Assembly,
in Paris ; when the electors, assembled from sixty districts,
refused to depart from Paris ; when the garden of the Palais
Royal was the scene of the nightly assemblage of more for-
eigners, debauchees, and loungers, than had ever been seen
in Paris; when people came into Paris from all parts of
France; when there was all the agitation, uproar, revelling,
banqueting, and delirium in Paris, which distinguished that
year of great events ; — when, in short, the meat-eating classes
were all in Paris, and all at high-feasting in the whirl and
fury of such a time !
Mr. Baron Alderson takes this very year of 1789, and
dividing the quantity of meat consumed by the population
of Paris, sets before the grand jury the childish absurdity of
there having been 147 Ibs. of meat per man, as a proof of
the physical comforts of the people ! This year of 1789
being on record as the hardest ever known by the French
people since the disasters of Louis xiv., and the immortal
charity of Fenelon ! This year of 1789 being the year when
Mirabeau was speaking in the Assembly of 'famished Paris';
when the king was forced to receive deputations of women
who demanded bread ; and when they rang out to all Paris,
'Bread ! rise up for bread !' with the great bell of the Hotel
de Ville !
It would be idle to dissect such evidence more minutely.
It is too gross and palpable. We will conclude with a final
and grave reason, as it seems to us, for noticing this serious
mistake on the part of Baron Alderson.
That learned judge is much deceived if he imagines that
there are not, among the chartists, men possessed of suffi-
cient information to detect such juggling, and make the
most of it. Those active and mischievous agents of the
chartists who live by lecturing will do more with such a
charge as this, than they could do with all the misery in
England for the next twelve months. In any common his-
tory of the French Revolution, they have the proof against
76 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Mr. Baron Alderson under their hands. The grade of edu-
cation and intellect they address, is particularly prone to
accept a brick as a specimen of a house, and its ready con-
clusion from such an exposition as this is, that the whole
system which rules and restrains it is a falsehood and a cheat.
It was but the other day that Mr. Baron Alderson stated
to some chartist prisoners, as a fact which everybody knew,
that any man in England who was industrious and persever-
ing could obtain political power. Are there no industrious
and persevering men in England on whom this comfortable
doctrine casts a slur? We rather think the chartist lecturers
might find out some.
EDINBURGH APPRENTICE SCHOOL
ASSOCIATION
[DECEMBER 30, 1848]
WE cannot allow the annual report of this excellent educa-
tional society to appear, without a word of notice and
approval. It records the interesting success of the appren-
tice schools during four years, and records, too, some of those
impressive instances of individual perseverance and ardour
in the pursuit of knowledge which any such undertaking,
properly directed, is sure to bring to light.
These schools were established for the instruction of work-
men and apprentices ; a class of persons who have no such
claim upon the public as is recognised (and righteously) in
crime and social degradation, but who, having begun to
labour for their daily bread early in life, and being usually
at work when other schools were open, stood grievously in
need of assistance. Instruction is furnished from eight to
ten o'clock in the evening, for the charge of fifteen pence
monthly to each student ; and although this is a far higher
charge, we believe, than is made at the school in connexion
with the Liverpool Mechanics' Institution for similar instruc-
tion to the apprentices of members, it cannot but be re-
EDINBURGH APPRENTICE SCHOOL 77
garded as a very small one in the circumstances of the Edin-
burgh Association.
The usual results have followed this useful undertaking.
'The success of the Society's scheme,' says the report, 'has
amply shown how truly such opportunities were wanted, and
how gladly they have been received by the parties for whom
they were designed. A steady increase has taken place in
the numbers attending the classes, a marked improvement in
the order and discipline of the scholars, and a decided ad-
vancement in the interest taken in their success, by all ranks
of society.'
Mr. Sheriff Gordon, at the annual meeting some days ago,
made these wise remarks: —
'I have not any perplexity or any hesitation about the Ap-
prentice Schools. They cannot possibly do any harm, while their
capability of doing good is not to be calculated by any single
generation of men. There is no work so absolutely certain to re-
munerate in some way the workman as the work laid out on the
improvement of the human mind. It does not, of course, ensure
anybody success, but it may make him contented and merry
while he toils; it will not, perhaps, make the pot boil to-day, but
by prompting quick thoughts for a sound head, it may keep
alive hope and courage for the happier efforts of to-morrow; it
may not in any worldly sense enrich a man at all, but it shall
bestow such enjoyment on the hours of leisure — it shall impart
such a relish to the intervals of friendship — it shall spread such
a glow round the fireside at home, as we know that the miser
cannot buy with all his hoards. (Applause.) . . . These
are occupations which, if our working classes cling to them faith-
fully, are not only productive of present tranquillity, but are big
with the largest interests of our future prosperity. I may feel
as a magistrate even a selfish satisfaction in knowing that the
working men of this city are being imbued with a thirst that has
no affinity to the pernicious draught of intemperance, and that
large numbers of them rather listen to the serene and sure-
footed lessons of science than to the slippery clamours of a rash
hesitation. But I am more glad as an humble individual mem-
ber of this great commonwealth of Britain to hail and encourage
the widest diffusion of knowledge. I see no peril in that what-
ever. For the effect of this movement will be that while the
working classes are educating themselves in their leisure hours,
78 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the higher classes must take care that their education, to which
they can devote so much more time, shall practically manifest its
superiority, by an increasing vigour and an increasing wisdom
in guiding the destinies and wielding the power of a community
so enlightened.'
If we had had a few sheriffs like Mr. Sheriff Gordon on
this side of the Tweed, years ago, our sheriffs would have
had less to do at the foot of the gallows. He is a good and
earnest man, and his earnestness begins at the right end.
We have no fear but that Edinburgh, of all the cities in the
world, will support her sheriff in such views as these, and
continue to maintain societies like these.
LEECH'S 'THE RISING GENERATION'
[DECEMBER 30, 1848]
THESE are not stray crumbs that have fallen from Mr.
Punch's well-provided table, but a careful reproduction by
Mr. Leech, in a very graceful and cheerful manner, of one
of his best series of designs. Admirable as the 'Rising
Generation' is in Mr. Punch's gallery, it shows to infinitely
greater advantage in the present enlarged and separate form
of publication.1
It is to be remarked of Mr. Leech that he is the very first
English caricaturist (we use the word for want of a better)
who has considered beauty as being perfectly compatible
with his art. He almost always introduces into his graphic
sketches some beautiful faces or agreeable forms ; and in
striking out this course and setting this example, we really
believe he does a great deal to refine and elevate that popular
branch of art which the facilities of steam printing and
wood-engraving are rendering more popular every day.
If we turn back to a collection of the works of Rowlandson
or Gilray, we shall find, in spite of the great humour dis-
played in many of them, that they are rendered wearisome
i The Rising Generation, a series of twelve Drawings on Stone. By
John Leech. From his Original Designs in the Gallery of Mr. Punch.
Punch Office.
'THE RISING GENERATION' 79
and unpleasant by a vast amount of personal ugliness.
Now, besides that it is a poor device to represent what is
satirised as being necessarily ugly — which is but the resource
of an angry child or a jealous woman — it serves no purpose
but to produce a disagreeable result. There is no reason
why the farmer's daughter in the old caricature who is squall-
ing at the harpsichord (to the intense delight, by the bye, of
her worthy father, the farmer, whom it is her duty to
please) should be squab and hideous. The satire on the
manner of her education, if there be any in the thing at all,
would be just as good if she were pretty. Mr. Leech would
have made her so. The average of farmers' daughters in
England are not impossible lumps of fat. One is quite as
likely to find a pretty girl in a farmhouse as to find an ugly
one ; and we think, with Mr. Leech, that the business of this
style of art is with the pretty one. She is not only
a pleasanter object in our portfolio, but we have more
interest in her. We care more about what does become her
and does not become her. In Mr. Punch's Alma-
nack for the new year, there is one illustration by Mr.
Leech representing certain delicate creatures with be-
witching countenances, encased in several varieties of that
amazing garment, the ladies' paletot. Formerly these fair
creatures would have been made as ugly and ungainly as
possible, and there the point would have been lost, and the
spectator, with a laugh at the absurdity of the whole group,
would not have cared one farthing how such uncouth crea-
tures disguised themselves, or how ridiculous they became.
But to represent female beauty as Mr. Leech represents
it, an artist must have a most delicate perception of it, and
the gift of being able to realise it to us with two or three
slight, sure touches of his pencil. This power Mr. Leech
possesses in an extraordinary degree.
For this reason, we enter our protest against those of the
'rising generation' who are precociously in love, being made
the subject of merriment by a pitiless and unsympathising
world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in the right than
the young gentleman kneeling on the chair to beg a lock of
hair from his pretty cousin, to take back to school. Mad-
80 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ness is in her apron, and Virgil, dog's-eared and defaced, is
in her ringlets. Doubts may suggest themselves of the
perfect disinterestedness of this other young gentleman con-
templating the fair girl at the piano — Doubts engendered by
his worldly allusion to 'tin' (though even that may arise in
his modest consciousness of his own inability to support an
establishment) ; but that he should be 'deucedly inclined to
go and cut that fellow out,' appears to us one of the most
natural emotions of the human breast. The young gentle-
man with the dishevelled hair and clasped hands, who loves
the transcendent beauty with the bouquet, and can't be happy
without her, is, to us, a withering and desolate spectacle.
Who could be happy without her?
The growing boys, or the rising generation, are not less
happily observed and agreeably depicted than the grown
women. The languid little creature who 'hasn't danced since
he was quite a boy,' is perfect, and the eagerness of the
little girl whom he declines to receive for a partner at the
hands of the glorious old lady of the house — her feet quite
ready for the first position — her whole heart projected into
the quadrille — and her glance peeping timidly at him out of
her flutter of hope and doubt — is quite delightful to look at.
The intellectual juvenile who awakens the tremendous wrath
of a Norma of private life, by considering woman an inferior
animal, is lecturing, this present Christmas, we understand,
on the Concrete in connection with the Will. We recognise
the legs of the philosopher who considers Shakespeare an
over-rated man, dangling over the side of an omnibus last
Tuesday. The scowling young gentleman who is clear that
'if his governor don't like the way he goes on in, why, he
must have chambers and so much a week,' is not of our
acquaintance ; but we trust he is by this time in Van Diemen's
Land, or he will certainly come to Newgate. We should be
exceedingly unwilling to stand possessed of personal prop-
erty in a strong box, and be in the relation of bachelor-uncle
to that youth. We would on no account reside at that
suburb of ill omen, Camberwell, under such circumstances,
remembering the Barnwell case.
In all his drawings, whatever Mr. Leech desires to do, he
THE PARADISE AT TOOTING 81
does. The expression indicated, though indicated by the
simplest means, is exactly the natural expression, and is rec-
ognised as such immediately. His wit is good-natured, and
always the wit of a true gentleman. He has a becoming
sense of responsibility and self-restraint ; he delights in pleas-
ant things ; he imparts some pleasant air of his own to things
not pleasant in themselves ; he is suggestive and full of
matter, and he is always improving. Into the tone, as well
as into the execution of what he does, he has brought a
certain elegance which is altogether new, without involving
any compromise of what is true. He is an acquisition to
popular art in England who has already done great service,
and will, we doubt not, do a great deal more. Our best
wishes for the future, and our cordial feeling towards him for
the past, attend him in his career.
It is eight or ten years ago since a writer in the Quarterly
Re^ie'w, making mention of Mr. George Cruikshank, com-
mented, in a few words, on the absurdity of excluding such
a man from the Royal Academy, because his works were not
produced in certain materials, and did not occupy a certain
space annually on its walls. Will no Members and Asso-
ciates be found upon its books, one of these days, the labours
of whose oils and brushes will have sunk into the profoundest
obscurity, when the many pencil-marks of Mr. Cruikshank
and of Mr. Leech will still be fresh in half the houses in the
land?
THE PARADISE AT TOOTING
[JANUARY 20, 1849]
WHEN it first became known that a virulent and fatal epi-
demic had broken out in Mr. Drouet's farming establishment
for pauper children at Tooting, the comfortable flourish
of trumpets usxial on such occasions (Sydney Smith's ad-
mirable description of it will be fresh in the minds of many
of our readers) was performed as a matter of course. Of
all similar establishments on earth, that at Tooting was the
most admirable. Of all similar contractors on earth, Mr.
82 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Drouet was the most disinterested, zealous, and unimpeach-
able. Of all the wonders ever wondered at, nothing perhaps
had ever occurred more wonderful than the outbreak and
rapid increase of a disorder so horrible, in a place so per-
fectly regulated. There was no warning of its approach.
Nothing was less to be expected. The farmed children were
slumbering in the lap of peace and plenty ; Mr. Drouet, the
farmer, was slumbering with an easy conscience, but with one
eye perpetually open, to keep watch upon the blessings he
diffused, and upon the happy infants under his paternal
charge; when, in a moment, the destroyer was upon them,
and Tooting churchyard became too small for the piles of
children's coffins that were carried out of this Elysium every
day.
The learned coroner for the county of Surrey deemed it
quite unnecessary to hold any inquests on these dead chil-
dren, being as perfectly satisfied in his own mind that Mr.
Drouet's farm was the best of all possible farms, as ever the
innocent Candide was that the great chateau of the great
Baron Thunder-ten Trouekh was the best of all possible
chateaux. Presuming that this learned functionary is amen-
able to some authority or other, and that he will be duly
complimented on his sagacity, we will refer to the proceed-
ings before a very different kind of coroner, Mr. Wakley,
and his deputy Mr. Mills. But that certain of the miserable
little creatures removed from Tooting happened to die within
Mr. Wakley 's jurisdiction, it is by no means unlikely that a
committee might have sprung into existence by this time, for
presenting Mr. Drouet with some magnificent testimonial, as
a mark of public respect and sympathy.
Mr. Wakley, however, being of little faith, holds inquests,
and even manifests a disposition to institute a very searching
inquiry into the causes of these horrors ; rather thinking that
such grievous effects must have some grievous cause. Re-
membering that there is a public institution called the 'Board
of Health,' Mr. Wakley summons before him Dr. Grainger,
an inspector acting under that board, who has examined Mr.
Drouet's Elysium, and has drawn up a report concerning it.
It then comes out — truth is so perverse — that Mr. Drouet
is not altogether that golden farmer he was supposed to be.
It appears that there is a little alloy in his composition. The
'extreme closeness, oppression, and foulness of air' in that
supposed heaven upon earth over which he presides, 'exceeds
in offensiveness anything ever yet witnessed by the inspector,
in apartments in hospitals, or elsewhere, occupied by the
sick.' He has a bad habit of putting four cholera patients in
one bed. He has a weakness in respect of leaving the sick to
take care of themselves, surrounded by every offensive, inde-
cent, and barbarous circumstance that can aggravate the
horrors of their condition and increase the dangers of infec-
tion. He is so ignorant, or so criminally careless, that he
has taken none of the easy precautions, and provided himself
with none of the simple remedies, expressly enjoined by the
Board of Health in their official announcement published in
the Gazette, and distributed all over the country. The expe-
rience of all the medical observers of cholera, in all parts of
the world, is not in an instant overthrown by Mr. Drouet's
purity, for he had unfortunately one fortnight's warning of
the impending danger, which he utterly disregarded. He
has been admonished by the authorities to take only a cer-
tain number of unfortunates into his farm, and he increase?
that number immensely at his own pleasure, for his own
profit. His establishment is crammed. It is in no respect
a fit place for the reception of the throng shut up in it.
The dietary of the children is so unwholesome and insufficient,
that they climb secretly over palings, and pick out scraps
of sustenance from the tubs of hog-wash. Their clothing by
day, and their covering by night, are shamefully defective.
Their rooms are cold, damp, dirty, and rotten. In a word,
the age of miracles is past, and of all conceivable places in
which pestilence might — or rather must — be expected to
break out, and to make direful ravages, Mr. Drouet's model
farm stands foremost.
In addition to these various proofs of his mortal fallibility,
Mr. Drouet, even when he is told what to do to save life, has
an awkward habit of prevaricating, and not doing it. He
also bullies his assistants, in the inspector's presence, when
they show an inclination to reveal disagreeable truths. He
84 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
has a pleasant brother — a man of an amiable eccentricity —
who besides being active, for all improper purposes, in the
farm, is 'with difficulty restrained' from going to Kensing-
ton 'to thrash the guardians' of that Union for proposing to
remove their children ! The boys under Mr. Drouet's foster-
ing protection are habitually knocked down, beaten, and
brutally used. They are put on short diet if they complain.
They are 'very lean and emaciated.' Mr. Drouet's system is
admirable, but it entails upon them such slight evils as 'wast-
ing of the limbs, debility, boils, etc.,' and a more dreadful
aggravation of the itch than a medical witness of great
experience has ever beheld in thirty years' practice. A kick,
which would be nothing to a child in sound health, becomes,
ander Mr. Drouet's course of management, a serious wound.
Boys who were intelligent before going to Mr. Drouet, lose
their animation afterwards (so swears a Guardian) and
become fools. The surgeon of St. Pancras reported, five
months ago, of the excellent Mr. Drouet, 'that a great deal
of severity, not to use a harsh term,' — but why not a harsh
term, surgeon, if the occasion require it? — 'has been exer-
cised by the masters in authority, as well as some out of
authority,' meaning, we presume, the amiably eccentric
brother. Everything, in short, that Mr. Drouet does, or
causes to be done, or suffers to be done, is vile, vicious, and
cruel. All this is distinctly in proof before the coroner's
jury, and therefore we see no reason to abstain from sum-
ming it up.
But there is blame elsewhere ; and though it cannot dimin-
ish the heavy amount of blame that rests on this sordid con-
tractor's head, there is great blame elsewhere. The parish
authorities who sent these children to such a place, and,
seeing them in it, left them there, and showed no resolute
determination to reform it altogether, are culpable in the
highest degree. The Poor-Law Inspector who visited this
place, and did not in the strongest terms condemn it, is not
less culpable. The Poor-Law Commissioners, if they had
the power to issue positive orders for its better management
(a point which is, however, in question), were as culpable as
any of the rest.
It is wonderful to see how those who, by slurring the
matter when they should have been active in it, have become,
in some sort, participes criminis, desire to make the best of it,
even now. The Poor-Law Inspector thinks that the issuing
of an order by the Poor-Law Commissioners, prohibiting
boards of guardians from sending children to such an institu-
tion, would have been 'a very strong measure.' As if very
strong cases required very weak measures, or there were no
natural affinity between the measure and the case ! He cer-
tainly did object to the children sleeping three in a bed, and
Mr. Drouet afterwards told him he had reduced the number
to two — its increase to four when the disease was raging
being, we suppose, a special sanitary arrangement. He did
not make any recommendation as to ventilation. He did
not call the children privately before him, to inquire how
they were treated. He considers the dietary a fair dietary — •
IF proper quantities "were given "where no precise quantity
is specified. He thinks that, with care, the premises might
have been occupied without injury to health, IF all the accom-
modation on the premises had been judiciously applied. As
though a man should say he felt convinced he could live
pretty comfortably on the top of the monument, IF a hand-
some suite of furnished apartments were constructed there
expressly for him, and a select circle came up to dinner
every day!
These children were farmed to Mr. Drouet a,t four shill-
ings and sixpence a week each; and some of the officials
seem to set sore by its being a great deal of money, and to
think exoneration lies in that. It may be a very sufficient
sum, considering that Mr. Drouet was entitled to the profits
of the children's work besides ; but this seems to us to be no
part of the question. If the payment had been fourteen and
sixpence a week each, the blame of leaving the children to
Mr. Drouet's tender mercies without sufficient protection,
and of leaving Mr. Drouet to make his utmost profit without
sufficient check, would have been exactly the same. When a
man keeps his horse at livery, he does not take the corn for
granted, because he pays five-and-twenty shillings a week.
In the history of this calamity, one undoubted predisposing
8C MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
cause was insufficient clothing. What says Mr. William Robert
James, solicitor and clerk to the Board of Guardians of the
Holborn Union, on that head? Mr. Drouet 'told him in
conversation ( !) that the four and sixpence a week would
include clothing. No particular description of clothing was
mentioned.' Is it any wonder that the flannel petticoats
worn by the miserable female children in the severest
weather of this winter, could be — as was publicly stated in
another metropolitan union a few days ago — 'read through'?
This same Mr. James produces minutes of visits made by
deputations of guardians to the Tooting Paradise. Thus : —
'As regards the complaint of Hannah Sleight, as to the in-
sufficiency of food, we believe it to be unfounded. Elizabeth
Male having complained that on her recent visit she found her
children in a dirty state, her children had our particular atten-
tion, and we beg to state that there was no just cause of com-
plaint on her part.'
It being clear to the meanest capacity that Elizabeth Male's
children not being dirty then, never could by possibility have
been dirty at any antecedent time.
But it appears that this identical James, solicitor and clerk
to the Board of Guardians of the Holborn Union, had a
valuable system of his own for eliciting the truth, which was,
to ask the boys in Mr. Drouet's presence if they had any-
thing to complain of, and when they answered 'Yes,' to rec-
ommend that they should be instantly horsewhipped. We
learn this from the following extraordinary minute of one
of these official visits: —
'We beg to report to the board our having on Tuesday, the 9th
of May, visited Mr. Drouet's establishment to ascertain the
state of the children belonging to this union. We were there at
the time of dinner being supplied, and in our opinion the meat
provided was good, but the potatoes were bad. We visited the
schoolrooms, dormitories, and workshops. Everything appeared
clean and comfortable, yet we are of opinion that the new sleep-
Ing rooms for infants on the ground floor have a very unhealthy
smell. The girls belonging to the union looked very well. The
boys appeared sickly, which induced us to question them as to
THE PARADISE AT TOOTING 87
whether they had any cause of complaint as to supply of food
or otherwise. About forty of them held up their hands to in-
timate their dissatisfaction, upon which Mr. Drouet's conduct be-
came violent. He called the boys liars, described some that had
held up their hands as the worst boys in the school, and said that
if he had done them justice, he would have followed out the
suggestion of Mr. James, and well thrashed them. (Laughter.)
We then began to question the boys individually, and some of
them complained of not having sufficient bread at their breaks
fast. Whilst pressing the inquiry, Mr. Drouet's conduct became
more violent. He said we were acting unfairly in the mode of
inquiry, that we ought to be satisfied of his character without
such proceedings, and that we had no right to pursue the in-
quiry in the way we were doing, and that he would be glad to
get rid of the children. To avoid further altercation we left,
not having fully completed the object of our visit.'
If Mr. Drouet were sincere in saying he would be glad to
get rid of the children, he must be in a very complacent frame
of mind at present when he has succeeded in getting rid,
for ever, of so many. But the general complacency, on
the occasions of these visits, is marvellous. Hear Mr. Winch,
one of the guardians of the poor for the Holborn Union,
who was one of the visiting party at the Tooting Paradise
on this 9th of May: —
'I was in company with Mr. Mayes and Mr. Rebbeck. The
children were at dinner. They were all standing; I was in-
formed they never sit at their meals. I tasted the meat, and I
cut open about 100 potatoes at different tables, none of which
were fit to eat. They were black and diseased. I told Mr.
Drouet the potatoes were very bad. He replied that they cost
him £7 a ton. The children had no other vegetables. I told
Mr. Drouet I should give them other food. He made no reply.
I also told Mr. Drouet I thought the newly erected rooms smelt
unhealthy. Mr. Mayes said it was a pity when he was building
he had not made the rooms higher; when Mr. Drouet said he
would have enough to do if he paid attention to everybody. We
went through some of the sleeping-rooms, which appeared very
clean. The girls looked well; but the boys, who were mustered
in the schoolroom, appeared very sickly and unhealthy. Mr,
Drouet, his brother, and the schoolmaster were present. Mr.
88 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Rebbeck said to the boys: "Now, if you have anything to com-
plain of — want of food, or anything else — hold up your hands" ;
and from thirty to forty held up their hands. Mr. Drouet be-
came very violent, and said we were treating him in an ungen-
tlemanly manner; he said that some of the boys who had held
up their hands were liars, and scoundrels, and rascals. He said
we were using him very unfairly; that his character was at stake;
and if we had anything to complain of, that was not the way to
proceed. One of the boys whom I questioned told me they had
not bread enough either for breakfast or supper; and, on com-
paring their dietary with that in the workhouse, I think such is
the case. In consequence of the confusion, we left Mr. Drouet's
without signing the visitors' book. I did not make any motion
in the Board of Guardians for the removal of the children. I
again visited Mr. Drouet's establishment on the 30th of May.
The potatoes were then of excellent quality. / went into the
pantry, and was surprised to find the bread was not weighed out.
We weigh it out in the union, as we find that is the only way to
give satisfaction. The loaves at Mr. Drouet's were cut into six-
teen pieces without being weighed. I saw no supply of salt in
the dining-room, but some of the boys who had salt in bags were
bartering their salt for potatoes. I did not ask the children
whether they had been punished in consequence of what had
taken place at my previous visit. We were in the establishment
for an hour and a half or two hours on the 30th. We then ex-
pressed our satisfaction at what we witnessed. We made no
further inquiry as to what had occurred on our previous visit.
I made no suggestion to the board for the improvement of the
dietary. We had no means of ascertaining that the children re-
ceived the amount of food mentioned in the diet-table.'
But we expressed our satisfaction at what we witnessed.
Oh dear, yes ! Our unanimity was delightful. Nobody
complained. The boys had had ample encouragement to
complain. They had seen Mr. Drouet standing glowering
by, on the previous occasion. They had heard him break
out about liars, and scoundrels, and rascals. They had
understood that his precious character — unmeasurably more
precious than the existence of any number of pauper chil-
dren— was at stake. They had had the benefit of a little
fatherly advice and caution from him, in the interval. They
were in a position, moral and physical, to be high-spirited.
THE TOOTING FARM 89
bold and open. Yet not a boy complained. We went home
to our Holborn Union, rejoicing. Our clerk was in tip-top
spirits about the thrashing joke. Everything was comfort-
able and pleasant. Of all places in the world, how could
the cholera ever break out, after this, in Mr. Drouet's Para-
dise at Tooting !
If we had been left to the so-much vaunted self-govern-
ment, it might have been unanswered still, and the Drouet
testimonial might have been in full vigour. But the Board
of Health — an institution of which every day's experience
attests in some new form the value and importance — has set-
tled the question. Plainly thus : — The cholera, or some un-
usually malignant form of typhus assimilating itself to that
disease, broke out in Mr. Drouet's farm for children, because
it was brutally conducted, vilely kept, preposterously in-
spected^ dishonestly defended, a disgrace to a Christian
community, and a stain upon a civilised land.
THE TOOTING FARM
[JANUARY 27, 1849]
ON Tuesday last the coroner's jury, after a long inquiry be-
fore Mr. Wakley, returned a verdict of manslaughter against
the Tooting Farmer, coupled with an expression of their
regret at the defects of the Poor-Law Act, and of their hope
that establishments similar to that at Tooting would soon
cease to exist.
Nothing came out in the further progress of the inquiry
to soften those results of evidence which we summed up
generally last week. The new testimony did anything but
weaken the case against the person now criminally inculpated.
On the contrary, the physical deterioration of the surviving
children, as a body, was more affectingly and convincingly
shown than before. What good legal assistance could do
for the defence, was done, but it could do nothing. What
deplorable shifts and attempts at evasion on the part of an
90 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
educated witness could do on the same side, was also done.
But it could do nothing either.
We observe that one metropolitan Board of Guardians
considers itself ill-used by the public comments that have
been made on this case, and is about to enter on a voluntary
defence of itself. Any individual or body of individuals
made the subject of uncomplimentary newspaper remark, is
ill-used as a matter of course. It never was otherwise.
The precedents are numerous. Mr. Thurtell was very bitter
on this point, and so was Mr. Greenacre. But while we
recognise a broad distinction between the culpability of those
who consigned hundreds of children to this hateful place,
too easily satisfied by formal, periodical visitation of it — •
and the guilt of its administrator, who knew it at all hours
and times, at its worst as well as at its best, and who drove
a dangerous and cruel traffic, for his own profit, at his own
peril, — we must take leave to repeat that the Board of
Guardians concerned are grossly in the wrong. The plain
truth is, that they took for granted what they should have
thoroughly sifted and ascertained. A certain establishment
for the reception of pauper children exists. One Board of
Guardians sends its children there: other Boards of Guard-
ians follow one another in its wake, like sheep. We will
assume that the existing accommodation in their Unions was
insufficient for the reception of these children. For aught
we know, it may, in the case of the St. Pancras workhouse,
for example, have been perfectly inadequate. But that is no
reason for sending them to Tooting, and no ground of de-
fence for having sent them there. The sending them to
Norfolk Island, on the banks of the Niger, might be jus-
tified as well, by the same logic.
We have no intention of prejudging a case which is now
to be brought to issue before a criminal court. It will be
decided upon the law, and upon the evidence, and there is not
the least fear that the general humanity will unjustly preju-
dice the party impeached. That is not at all a common
vice of such a trial in England. What we desire to do, is to
point out in a few words why we hold it to be particularly
desirable that this case, in all its relations, should be rigidly
THE TOOTING FARM 91
dealt with upon its own merits ; and why that vague disposi-
tion to smooth over the things that be, which sometimes
creeps into the most important English proceedings, should,
in this instance of all others, have no pin's-point of place to
rest upon.
In town and country, for some months past, we have been
trying and punishing with necessary severity certain sedi-
tious men who did their utmost to incite the discontented to
disturbance of the public peace. We have, within the last
year, counted our special constables by tens of thousands,
and our loyal addresses to the throne by tens of scores. All
these demonstrations have been necessary, but some of them
have been sad necessities, and, on the subsidence of the
natural indignation of the moment, have not left much occa-
sion for triumph.
The chartist leaders who are now undergoing their vari-
ous sentences in various prisons, found the mass of their
audience among the discontented poor. The foremost of
them had not the plea of want to urge for themselves ; but
their misrepresentations were addressed to the toiling multi-
tudes, on whom social irregularities impossible to be avoided,
and complicated commercial circumstances difficult to be ex-
plained to them, pressed heavily. There is no doubt that
among this numerous class, chartist principles are rife ; that
wherever the class is found in a large amount, there, also,
is a great intensity of discontent. There are few poor
working-men in the kingdom who might not find themselves
next year, next month, next week, in the position of those
fathers whose children were sent to Tooting; and there are
probably very few poor working-men who have not thought
'this might be my child's case, to-morrow.'
No opportunity of doing something towards the education
of such men in the conviction that the State is unfeignedly
mindful of them, and truly anxious to redress their tangible
and obvious wrongs, could be plainer than that which now
arises. If the system of farming pauper children cannot exist
without the danger of another Tooting Farm being weeded
by the grisly hands of Want, Disease, and Death, let it be
now abolished. If the Poor-Law, as it stands, be not effi-
92 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
cient for the prevention of such inhuman evils, let it be now
rendered more efficient. If it has unfortunately happened,
though by no man's deliberate intention or malignity — as
who can doubt it has? — that the children of sundry poor men
and women have been carried to untimely graves, who might
have lived and thriven, let there be seen a resolute determina-
tion that the like shall never happen any more. It is not
only even-handed justice, but it is clear, straightforward
policy. It is the correction of widely spread and artfully
fomented prejudice, dissatisfaction, and suspicion. It is to
challenge and to win the confidence of the poor man on his
tenderest point, and at his own fireside.
But to waste the occasion in play with foolscap and red
tape; to bewilder all these listening ears with mere official
gabble about Boards, and Inspectors, and Guardians, and
responsibility, and non-responsibility, and divided responsi-
bility, and powers, and clauses, and sections, and chapters,
until the remedy is crushed to pieces in a mill of words ; will
be to swell the mischief to an extent that is incalculable.
There are scores of heads in the mills of Lancashire and the
shops of Birmingham, sufficiently confused already by some-
thing more perplexing than the rattling of looms or the beat-
ing of hammers. Such dazed men must be spoken to dis-
tinctly. They will hear then, and hear aright. Let the
debtor and creditor account between the governors and the
governed be kept in a fair, bold hand, that all may read,
and the governed will soon read it for themselves, and dis-
pense with interpreters who are paid by chartist clubs.
THE VERDICT FOR DROUET
[APRIL 21, 1849]
THE peculiarity of this verdict is that while it has released
the accused from the penalties of the law, it has certainly not
released him from the guilt of the charge. The prosecu-
tion, badly as it was conducted, established what was alleged
against Drouet. The hunger and thirst were proved; the
THE VERDICT FOR DROUET 98
bad food, and the insufficient clothing; the cold, the ill-
treatment, the uncleanliness ; the diseases generated by filth
and neglect; the itch (much to Baron Platt's amusement),
the scald heads, the sore eyes, the scrofulous affections, the
pot bellies, and the thin shanks. All were proved. We give
a thousand cubic feet of respirable air to every felon in his
prison, and each child in Drouet's prison had little more than
a tenth part so much. They were half -starved, and more
than half-suffocated. A terrible malady broke out, and a
hundred and fifty perished. It was in evidence that every
indecent and revolting incident that could aggravate the
slightest illness, or increase the horrors of the most danger-
ous infection, existed in the establishment for which Drouet
was responsible, when disease appeared there. But it was
not satisfactorily proved that the disease might not have
killed as many without such help, and therefore Mr. Baron
Platt very properly told the jury that the case had broken
down.
The legal point arose upon that part of the indictment
which charged Drouet with having neglected the duty of a
right mode of treatment to the child named in it ; in support
of which the fact of the constitutional energy of the child
having been so reduced by his management as to render it
unable to resist the particular disease, was relied upon as
having brought Drouet within the penalties of manslaughter.
But the judge, setting aside this argument as inapplicable
to the case, directed an acquittal on the ground that there
had been no evidence adduced to show that the child was ever,
at any time, in such a state of health as to render it proba-
ble he would have recovered from the malady but for the
treatment of the defendant.
The extent of the wrong, in other words, precluded the
remedy. For who, in such a crowd of children, could have
singled out one poor child at any time, to say whether he was
well or ill? The deputy-matron of the workhouse from
which he went to Tooting, and to which he returned to die,
could only say of the whole hundred and fifty-six that came
back to her on the same night, that 'they were not so strong
and healthy as when they went to Mr. Drouet's.' No —
94 • MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
she was certain they were not. 'They were very sore in
their bodies, and had sore feet, and there were wounds on
different parts of their persons,' and some lived, and some
died, and among the latter was little Andrews. That is the
whole humble history. There was no doctor to examine the
children when they left, or when they returned ; and evidence
of half the wickedness of the 'farm' was rejected, because
one wretched little figure could not always be separated from
a crowd exactly like himself, and shown as he contended with
horrors to which all were equally exposed.
Mr. Baron Platt declared himself early. The prosecution
being less strongly represented than the defence, he took
the very first opportunity of siding with the stronger. Wit-
nesses that required encouragement, he brow-beated ; and
witnesses that could do without it, he insulted or ridiculed.
Medical men are not famous for the clearness of their testi-
mony at any time, and such questions from the bench as
whether hunger and the itch were connected, and whether
cholera was producible by the itch, did not put them more
at their ease. Of course there was laughter at the facetious-
ness. There was also zealous applause, with which the pris-
oner signified his concurrence by tapping with his hand in
front of the dock.
Nevertheless the trial cannot be read without much anguish
of heart. The inexpressible sadness of its details is not
relieved by Mr. Baron Platt's jocoseness. One little touch
came out in the evidence of a peculiarly affecting kind, such
as the masters of pathos have rarely excelled in fiction. The
learned baron was not moved by it; naturally enough, for he
had not the least notion what it meant.
Mary Harris, examined by Mr. Clarkson: — I am a nurse at
Holborn Union Workhouse, and went to the Royal Free Hospital,
Gray's Inn Road. I recollect Andrews coming with the other
boys. He was not well. I gave him some milk and bread.
Mr. Clarkson: Did he eat his bread? — Witness: No; he held
up his head, and said, 'Oh, nurse, what a big bit of bread this is!'
Baron Platt: It was too much for him, I suppose? — Witness:
He could not eat it.
'VIRGINIE' AND 'SUSAN' 95
'Oh, nurse!' says the poor little fellow, with an eager sense
that what he had longed for had come too late ; 'what a big bit
of bread this is!' Yes, Mr. Baron Platt, it is clear that it
was too much for him. His head was lifted up for an
instant, but it sank again. He could not but be full of
wonder and pleasure that the big bit of bread had come,
though he could not eat it. An English poet in the days
when poetry and poverty were inseparable companions, re-
ceived a bit of bread in somewhat similar circumstances which
proved too much for him, and he died in the act of swallow-
ing it. The difference is hardly worth pointing out. The
pauper child had not even strength for the effort which
choked the pauper poet.
Drouet was 'affected to tears' as he left the dock. It might
be gratitude for his escape, or it might be grief that his
occupation was put an end to. For no one doubts that the
child-farming system is effectually broken up by this trial.
And every one must recognise that a trade which derived its
profits from the deliberate torture and neglect of a class the
most innocent on earth, as well as the most wretched and
defenceless, can never on any pretence be resumed.
'VIRGINIE' AND 'BLACK-EYED SUSAN'
[MAY 12, 1849]
A PLAY in five acts by the Oxenford, founded on the French
Virgime, by M. Latour de St. Ytres, was produced here 1
on Monday night to a crowded house, with very great suc-
cess, thoroughly deserved in all respects. The English ver-
sion of the play is most spirited, scholarly, and elegant ; the
principal characters were sustained with great power ; and
the getting-up of the piece was quite extraordinary in re-
spect of the care, good sense, and good taste bestowed
upon it.
There is sufficient novelty in this version of the great
Norman story, to which the Oxenford has done such delicate
i Marylebone Theatre.
96 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
poetical justice, to attract and interest even that portion
of the play-going public who are familiar with the fine
tragedy of Mr. Knowles. A much larger share of the in-
terest is thrown upon the heroine. Icilius, like Queen Eliz-
abeth in Mr. Puff's Tragedy, is kept in the Green Room all
night, until he is slain through the treachery of Appius Clau-
dius. And the curtain falls upon the death of Virginia, and
the slaying of Appius Claudius by Virginius on the Judg-
ment Seat.
Virginia was acted by Mrs. Mowatt. Throughout, and
especially in the more quiet scenes, as in the appeal to the
Household Gods before leaving home on the bridal morning,
the character was rendered in a touching, truthful, and wom-
anly manner, that might have furnished a good lesson to
some actresses of high pretensions we could name. There is
great merit in all this lady does. She very rarely oversteps
the modesty of nature. She is not a conventional performer.
She has a true feeling for nature and for her art ; and we
question whether any one now upon the stage could have acted
this part better, or have acted it so well. Mr. Davenport
also, as Virginius, played admirably; with a great deal of
pathos, passion, and dignity. Both were loudly called for at
the close of the play, and heartily greeted.
We have already spoken, in general terms, of the manner
in which this piece was put upon the stage. It would be un-
just not to particularise the last scene of the Roman Forum,
which exhibits quite a wonderful use of the space and re-
sources of the theatre, and is a most complete and beautiful
thing. The same spirit pervades all that is brought for-
ward here. A fortnight since, we saw Romeo and Juliet on
this stage, really presented in a way that would do credit to
any theatre in the world.
The tragedy was followed by Mr. Jerrold's Black- Eyed
Susan, at which the audience laughed and wept with all their
hearts, and which is a remarkable illustration of what a man
of genius may do with a common-enough thing, and how what
he does will remain a thing apart from all imitation. Of
the many nautical dramas that have come and gone like
showers (and not very wholesome showers either) since Black-
AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE 97
Eyed Susan was first produced, there is probably not one
but has had this piece for its model, and has pillaged and
rifled it, according to its (Dramatic) author's taste. And
the whole run of them are as like it, at least, as the Maryle-
bone Theatre is like St. Paul's or St. Peter's. Acted as it
is here, it should be seen again. Nothing can be better than
Mr. Davenport's William ; Miss Vining, a very clever actress,
is excellent in Susan ; and neither the Court Martial nor the
Execution Scene were ever half so well presented in our re-
membrance. It is a pleasant duty to point out the deserts
of this theatre as it is now conducted, and to recommend it
honestly. We know what some minor theatres in London are,
and we know what this was before it became a refuge for the
proscribed drama. The influence of such a place cannot
but be beneficial and salutary. It richly deserves support,
and we hope it will be supported.
AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE
[JULY 21, 1849]
WHY an honest republican, coming from the United States
to England on a mission of inquiry into ploughs, turnips,
mangel-wurzel, and live stock, cannot be easy unless he is for
ever exhibiting himself to his admiring countrymen, with a
countess hanging on each arm, a duke or two walking defer-
entially behind, and a few old English barons (all his very
particular friends) going on before, we cannot, to our sat-
isfaction, comprehend. Neither is his facility of getting
into such company quite intelligible ; unless something of the
spirit which rushes into print with a record of these genteel
processions, pervades the aristocratic as well as the republi-
can breast, and tickles the noble fancy with a bird's-eye view
of some thousands of American readers across the water,
poring, with open mouths and goggle-eyes, over descriptions
of its owner's domestic magnificence. We are bound to con-
fess, in justice to a stranger with Mr. Colman's opportuni-
98 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ties, that we are not altogether free from a suspicion of this
kind.
Mr. Colman came here, as we have already intimated,
charged with a mission of inquiry into the general agricul-
tural condition of the country. In this capacity he wrote
some reports very creditable to his good sense, expressed in
plain nervous English, and testifying to his acquaintance
with the rural writings of Cobbett. It would have been
better for Mr. Colman, and more agreeable, we conceive, to all
Americans of good sense and good taste, if he had con-
tented himself with such authorship ; but in an evil hour he
committed the two volumes before us,1 in which
He talks so like a waiting gentlewoman,
Of napkins, forks, and spoons (God save the mark!)
— that the dedication of his book to Lady Byron is an ob-
vious mistake, and an outrage on the rights of Mr. N. P.
Willis.
Mr. Colman's letters have one very remarkable feature
which our readers will probably never have observed before
in any similar case. They were not intended for publication.
Of this unprecedented fact, there is no doubt. He wrote
them, without a twinkle of his eye at the public, to some
partial friends ; who were so delighted with them and talked
so much about them, that all his other friends cried out for
copies. They would have copies. Now these may be ex-
cellent friends, but they are bitter bad j udges : still they
may be turned to good account ; for if Mr. Colman should
ever, in future, write anything that is particularly agreeable
to this audience, he may rely upon it that the nearest fire
will be its fittest destination.
We do not say but that there are parts of these letters which
exhibit the writer in the character of a good-natured, kind-
hearted private individual, though of a somewhat cumbrous
and elephantine jocularity, and of a rather startling senti-
mentality— as when he goes to see the charity children as-
i European Life and Manners, in Familiar Letters to Friends. By
Henry Colman, author of 'European Agriculture of France, Holland,
and Switzerland.' 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. London:
Letherham.
AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE 99
sembled at St. Paul's, and has impulses, on account of their
extraordinary beauty, to pitch himself out of the whisper-
ing-gallery head foremost into the midst of those young
Christians ; a homage to youth and innocence necessarily
involving the annihilation of the wearers of several under-
sized pairs of leather-breeches. But what Mr. Colman may
choose to write, in this private aspect of himself, to his
friends, is a very different thing from what he is justified in
calling upon the public to read. A man may play at horses
with his children, in his own parlour, and give nobody of-
fence ; but if he should hire the Opera House in London, or
the Theatre Fran£ais in Paris, for the exhibition of that
performance at so much a head, he would challenge criticism,
and might very justly be hissed.
The one great impression on our letter-writer's mind, of
which it does not appear at all probable that he will ever
completely relieve himself, is made by the internal economy
of an English nobleman's country house.
MR. COLMAN AT A GREAT COUNTRY MANSION
As soon as you arrive at the house, your name is announced,
your portmanteau is immediately taken into your chamber, which
the servant shows you, with every requisite convenience and com-
fort. At Lord Spencer's the watch opens your door in the night
to see if all is safe, as his house was once endangered by a gen-
tleman's reading in bed, and if he should find your light burning
after you had retired, excepting the night taper, or you reading
in bed, without a single word, he would stretch out a long ex-
tinguisher, and put it out. In the morning, a servant comes in
to let you know the time in season for you to dress for break-
fast. At half -past nine you go in to family prayers, if you find
out the time. They are happy to have the guests attend, but
they are never asked. The servants are all assembled in the
room fitted for a chapel. They all kneel, and the master of the
house, or a chaplain, reads the morning service. As soon as it is
over they all wait until he and his guests retire, and then the
breakfast is served. At breakfast there is no ceremony what-
ever. You are asked by the servant what you will have, tea or
coffee, or you get up and help yourself. Dry toast, boiled eggs,
and bread and butter are on the table, and on the side table you
100 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
will find cold ham, tongue, beef, etc., to which you carry your
own plate and help yourself, and come back to the breakfast
table and sit as long as you please. All letters or notes ad-
dressed to you are laid by your plate, and letters to be sent by
mail are put in the post-box in the entry, and are sure to go.
The arrangements for the day are then made, and parties are
formed, horses and carriages for all the guests are found at the
stables, and each one follows the bent of his inclination. When
he returns, if at noon, he finds a side table with an abundant
lunch upon it if he chooses, and when he goes to his chamber for
preparation for dinner, he finds his dress clothes brushed and
folded in the nicest manner, and cold water, and hot water, and
clean napkins in the greatest abundance.
One would think this sufficiently explicit, but here, a few
pages further on, is
MR. COLMAN AGAIN AT A GREAT COUNTRY MANSION
In most families the hour of breakfast is announced to you
before retiring, and the breakfast is entirely without ceremony.
Your letters are brought to you in the morning, and the mail
goes out every day. The postage of letters is always prepaid
by those who write them, who paste double or single stamps
upon them; and it is considered an indecorum to send a letter
unpaid, or sealed with a wafer. Any expense incurred for you,
if it be only a penny upon a letter, is at once mentioned to
you, and you of course pay it. At breakfast the arrangements
are made for the day; you are generally left to choose what you
will do, and horses and carriages are always at the service of
the guests, or guns and implements for sporting, if those are
their habits. There is your chamber, or the library, the billiard
room, or the garden, the park, or the village. You are not looked
for again, unless you make one of some party, until dinner time,
which is generally in a nobleman's house, seven o'clock. Break-
fast from nine to ten. Lunch, to which you go if you choose,
which in truth is a dinner, though most things are cold, at half-
past one; coffee immediately after dinner, and tea and cake
immediately after coffee. At eleven o'clock there is always a
candle for eacli guest, placed on the sideboard or in the entry,
with allumettes alongside of them, and at your pleasure you light
your own candle, and bid good night. In a Scotch family you
are expected to shake hands on retiring, with all the party, and
AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE 101
on meeting in the morning. The English are a little more re-
served, though in general, the master of the house shakes hands
with you. On a first introduction, no gentlemen shake hands,
but simply bow to each other. In the morning you come down
in undress, with boots, trousers of any colour, frock coat, etc.
At dinner, you are always expected to be in full dress; straight
coat, black satin, or white waistcoat, silk stockings and pumps,
but not gloves ; and if you dine abroad in London, you keep your
hat in your hand until you go in to dinner, when you give it to
a servant, or leave it in an ante-room. The lady of the house
generally claims the arm of the principal stranger, or the gentle-
man of the highest rank; she then assigns the other ladies and
gentlemen by name, and commonly waits until all her guests
precede her in to dinner, though this is not invariable. The gen-
tleman is expected to sit near the lady whom he hands in. Grace
is almost always said by the master, and it is done in the shortest
possible way. Sometimes no dishes are put upon the table until
the soup is done with, but at other times there are two covers
besides the soup. The soup is various; in Scotland it is usually
what they call hodge-podge, a mixture of vegetables with some
meat. After soup, the fish cover is removed, and this is com-
monly served round without any vegetables, but certainly not
more than one kind. After fish, come the plain joints, roast or
boiled, with potatoes, peas or beans, and cauliflowers. Then
sherry wine is handed by the servant to every one. German
wine is offered to those who prefer it; this is always drunk in
green glasses; then come the entrees, which are a variety of
French dishes, and hashes; then champagne is offered; after this
remove, come ducks, or partridges, or other game; after this the
bonbons, puddings, tarts, sweetmeats, blancmange; then cheese
and bread, and a glass of strong ale is handed round; then the
removal of the upper cloth, and oftentimes the most delicious
fruits and confectionery follow, such as grapes, peaches, melons,
apples, dried fruits, etc. etc. After this is put upon the table
a small bottle of Constantia wine, which is deemed very precious,
and handed round in small wine glasses, or noyeau, or some
other cordial. Finger glasses are always furnished, though in
some cases I have seen a deep silver plate filled with rose-water
presented to each guest in which he dips the corner of his napkin,
to wipe his lips or his fingers. No cigars or pipes are ever
offered, and soon after the removal of the cloth, the ladies retire
to the drawing-room, the gentlemen close up at the table, and
after sitting as long as you please, you go into the drawing-room
102 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
to have coffee and then tea. The wines at table are generally
of the most expensive quality; port, sherry, claret, seldom
madeira; but I have never heard any discussion about the char-
acter of wines, excepting that I have been repeatedly asked what
wine we usually drank in America.
In connection with this same establishment, we have the
happiness of learning that the butler 'takes care of all the
wines, fruit, glasses, candlesticks, lamps, and plate' ; also
that he has an under-butler 'for his adjunct.' The ladies,
it seems, 'never wear a pair of white satin shoes or white
gloves more than once.' And we have a dim vision of the
agitation of the tremendous depths of this social sea which
looks so smooth at top, when we are informed that 'some of
them (the ladies) if they find, on going into society, another
person of inferior rank wearing1 the same dress as themselves'
— which would certainly appear an inconvenient proceeding
— 'the dress, upon being taken off, is at once thrown aside,
and the lady's maid perfectly understands her perquisite.'
Having recovered our breath, impeded in the contempla-
tion of this awful picture, and the mysterious shadow thrown
around the lady's maid, we expect to find our American friend
in some new scene; and, indeed, we do find him, for a little
time, in the company of Scotch gentlemen, who keep small
ivory spoons in their pockets 'to shove their snuff up their
noses,' and who likewise carry small brushes in their pockets
to sweep their noses and upper lips with afterwards — which is
well known to be a practice universal with the bench and
bar of Scotland, and with the principal members of the
Scottish Universities, whose snuff is for the most part carried
after them in coal-scuttles by Highlanders, who cannot be
made to sneeze by any artificial process whatever. But our
traveller's foot is not upon his native heath in this society,
and he is back again in no time.
MR. COLMAN AGAIN AT A GREAT COUNTRY MANSION
The house is one of the most magnificent and ancient in the
country, having been long in the possession of the family. It
was once the property of the Marquis of Rockingham, one of
the most distinguished ministers of the crown in the war of the
AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE 103
revolution, and always an ardent friend of America. I think,
upon the whole, it is upon the largest scale of anything I have
yet seen. The house itself is six hundred and ten feet in length,
and the width proportionate. I was forewarned that I should
lose my way in it, and so I have done two or three times, until
at last, I have made sure of my own bedroom. The house is
elegantly furnished, parts of it superbly, and the style of living
is in keeping. I arrived about six, and after a short walk with
my noble host, the dressing bell rung, and I was shown at once
to my chamber. The chamber is a large and superb room, called
the blue-room, because papered with elegant blue satin paper,
and the bed and the windows hung with superb blue silk curtains.
My portmanteau had already been carried there, and the straps
untied for opening; a large coal fire was blazing; candles were
burning on the table, and water and everything else necessary
for ablution and comfort. There was, likewise, what is always
to be found in an English house, a writing-table, letter paper,
note paper, new pens, ink, sealing wax, and wax-taper, and a
letter-box is kept in the house, and notice given to the guests
always at what time the post will leave.
Nor is his mind yet discharged of the mere froth and foam
of that one idea, which must work henceforth with him while
memory lasts ; for, after travelling a few pages, we find
Ma. COLMAN AGAIN AT A GREAT COUNTRY MANSION
Imagine an elegant dining-room, the table covered with the
richest plate, and this plate filled with the richest viands which
the culinary art and the vintage and the fruit-garden can sup-
ply; imagine a horse at your disposal, a servant at your com-
mand to anticipate every want; imagine an elegant bed-chamber,
a bright coal fire, fresh water in basins, in goblets, in tubs, nap-
kins without stint as white as snow, a double mattress, a French
bed, sheets of the finest linen, a canopy of the richest silk, a
table portfolio, writing apparatus and stationery, allumettes, a
night lamp, candles, and silver candlesticks, and beautiful paint-
ings and exquisite statuary, and every kind of chair or sofa but
a rocking-chair, and then you will have some little notion of the
place where I now am.
And yet a few pages more and here is
104 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
MR. COLMAN AT THE GREATEST COUNTRY MANSION OF ALL
I asked, when I retired, what time do you breakfast? The
Duke replied, 'just what time you please, from nine to twelve.'
I always came down at nine precisely, and found the Duchess
at her breakfast. About half-past nine the Duke would come
in, and the ladies, one by one, soon after. At breakfast, the
side table would have on it cold ham, cold chicken, cold pheasant
or partridge, which you ask for, or to which, as is most common,
you get up and help yourself. On the breakfast table were
several kinds of the best bread possible, butter always fresh,
made that morning, as I have found at all these houses, and if
you ask for coffee or chocolate, it would be brought to you in
a silver coffee-pot, and you help yourself; if for tea, you would
have a silver urn to each guest, heated by alcohol, placed by
you, a small teapot, and a small caddie of black and green tea
to make for yourself, or the servant for you. The papers of
the morning, from London (for a country paper is rarely seen)
were then brought to you, and your letters, if any. At break-
fast, the arrangements were made for the day, and if you were
to ride, choose your mode, and at the minute the horses and
servants would be at the door.
At two o'clock is the lunch, which I was not at home to take,
and very rarely do take. A lunch at such houses, is in fact a
dinner; the table is set at half-past one, not quite so large as
for dinner. Commonly, there is roast meat, warm, birds, warm
or cold, cold chicken, cold beef, cold ham, bread, butter, cheesej
fruit, beer, ale, and wines, and every one takes it as he pleases,
standing, sitting, waiting for the rest, or not, and going away
when he pleases; dinner at seven, sometimes at eight, when all
are congregated in the drawing-room, five minutes before the
hour, in full dress. I have already told you the course at din-
ner, but at many houses, there is always a bill of fare — in this
case written, I had almost said engraved, on the most elegant
embossed and coloured paper ; always in French, and passed round
to the guests.
*The Duke' meantime, it is to be presumed, keeping his
noble eyes on Mr. Colman's waistcoat, until he satisfies his
noble mind that it is not a waistcoat, like his waistcoat;
which would render it indispensable for his Grace instantly to
depart from table, take it off in desperation, and bestow it on
his valet.
AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE 105
But there is one phase of the national character which
impresses our good traveller more than any other. It is re-
markable that the guests at a gentleman's house do not dash
at the dishes, and contend with one another for 'the fixings'
they contain, but put their trust in Providence, and in the
servants, and in the good time coming if they wait a little
longer ; — it is a grave consideration that they have water to
wash in, sheets to sleep in, paper to write letters on, and
allumettes to light their sealing-wax by ; — it is matter for a
philosopher's reflection that at breakfast you find the cold
beef on the sideboard, and at night the chamber candlestick
in the entry ; — but the distinctive mark of the national char-
acter, the centre prong in the trident of Britannia, the strong
tuft in the mane of the British lion, is the national propensity
to perform that humble household service which is familiarly
called 'emptying the slops.' This, and the kindred national
propensity to brush a man's clothes and polish his boots,
whensoever and wheresoever the clothes and boots can be
seized without the man, are the noteworthy things that can
never be effaced from an observant traveller's remembrance.
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
— even 'the Duke,' with his four-and-twenty silver tea-cad-
dies all of a row, may be made hay of by the inexorable getter-
in of human grass — but the ducal housemaid and the ducal
bootsboy will flourish in immortal freshness.
'I forgot to say,' writes Mr. Colman, and strange it is
indeed that any man should forget the having such a thing to
say — 'I forgot to say, if you leave your chamber twenty
times a day, after using your basin, you would find it clean,
and the pitcher replenished on your return ; and that you
cannot take your clothes off, but they are taken away,
brushed, folded, pressed, and placed in the bureau ; and at
the dressing hour, before dinner, you find your candles
lighted, your clothes laid out, your shoes cleaned, and every-
thing arranged for use.'
By and by he expiates on the bell-rope being always
within reach; on 'a worked night-cap' being 'not ijiifre-
quently' placed ready for you (though we suspect the
106 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Duchess of a personal attention to this article) ; on the un-
wonted luxury of a bootjack; on the high civilisation of a
little copper tea-kettle; on the imposing solemnity of that
complicated Institution known as dinner napkins — which, we
are told, 'are never left upon the table, but either thrown
into your chair, or on the floor under the table,' — but faithful
to the one great trait of Britain, he falls back on the boots
and clothes for ever 'brushed and folded and laid out for
use.*
Again and again we find Mr. Colman again at a great
country mansion — those to which we have followed him hav-
ing numerous successors. And again and again, after sim-
mering in his 'copper-kettle of hot-water,' and floundering
in his 'tub of cold,' he sinks into a gentle trance of admira-
tion at the brushing of his clothes and cleaning of his boots.
We could desire to have known whose blacking the Duke uses,
and we must regard the maker's name as unaccountably
omitted. It is one of the few such things Mr. Colman has
'forgotten to say.'
Much as we admire Mr. Colman in private life, we must
confess to being a little staggered by his appearances in
public. They are rare, but marvellous. His singular
emotions at St. Paul's we have already referred to, but his
experience of another public occasion is still more remark-
able.
MR. COLMAN AT THE OLD BAILEY
The judge, again and again, passed dreadful and heart-rend-
ing sentences upon some wretched boy, or some poor, miserable,
affrighted woman; and, after telling them, in the harshest man-
ner, that they might congratulate themselves upon escaping so
lightly, turned round and laughed heartily at the concern of the
compassionate alderman, who sat at his side and did what he
could to stay his violence, and at the surprise and anguish of the
poor convicts.
Next to our curiosity in respect of the Duke's blacking-
maker, and the conflict of our hopes and fears between War-
ren's blacking, 30 Strand, and Day and Martin's, 97 High
Holborn, we confess to a desire to be favoured with the name
COURT CEREMONIES 107
of this judge. For we cannot help thinking that it must be
Jeffreys, and that Mr. Colman, falling into a magnetic slum-
ber one day, when they had taken away his boots, became
clairvoyant as to the Bloody Assize.
With this we think we may conclude. How Mr. Colman
could espy no beggars on the roads in France, and how he
could find out nothing in Paris, of all the cities upon earth,
that had a poverty-stricken or vagabond aspect, we will not
relate. We hope, and believe, that he writes better about
things agricultural than about the topics of the Court Cir-
cular. We are chiefly sorry for the folly of his letters, be-
cause we take him to be a man of better stuff than their con-
tents would indicate ; and because, in the still increasing
facilities of friendly communication between the two sides
of the Atlantic (long may they continue to increase, and to
make the inhabitants of each shore better acquainted with
the other, to their mutual improvement, forbearance, and ad-
vantage!) we feel for the many American gentlemen with an
undoubted claim on the hospitality and respect of all classes
of English society who stand committed by such very egre-
gious slip-slop.
COURT CEREMONIES
[DECEMBER 15, 1849]
THE late Queen Dowager, whose death has given occasion
for many public tributes to exalted worth, often formally
and falsely rendered on similar occasions, and rarely, if ever,
better deserved than on this, committed to writing eight
years ago her wishes in reference to her funeral. This truly
religious and most unaffected document has been published
by her Majesty the Queen's directions. It is more honour-
able to the memory of the noble lady deceased than broad-
sides upon broadsides of fulsome panegyric, and is full of
good example to all persons in this empire, but particularly,
as we think, to the highest persons of all.
108 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I die in all humility, knowing well that we are all alike be-
fore the throne of God, and I request, therefore, that my morta]
remains be conveyed to the grave without any pomp or state.
They are to be moved to St. George's Chapel, Windsor, where
I request to have as private and quiet a funeral as possible.
I particularly desire not to be laid out in state, and the funeral
to take place by daylight; no procession; the coffin to be car-
ried by sailors to the chapel.
All those of my friends and relations, to a limited number,
who wish to attend may do so. My nephew, Prince Edward of
Saxe Weimar, Lords Howe, and Denbigh, the Hon. William Ash-
1 y, Mr. Wood, Sir Andrew Barnard, and Sir D. Davies, with
my dressers, and those of my Ladies who may wish to attend.
I die in peace, and wish to be carried to the tomb in peace,
and free from the vanities and the pomp of this world.
I request not to be dissected, nor embalmed; and desire to
give as little trouble as possible.
November 1841. ADELAIDE R.
It may be questionable whether the *Ceremonial for the
private interment of her late Most Excellent Majesty, Ade-
laide the Queen Dowager, in the Royal Chapel of St. George
at Windsor,' published at the same time as this affecting
paper, be quite in unison with the feelings it expresses. Un-
easy doubts obtrude themselves upon the mind whether 'her
late Majesty's state carriage drawn by six horses, in which
will be the crown of her late Majesty, borne on a velvet
cushion,' would not have been more in keeping with the fun-
eral requests of the late Mr. Ducrow. The programme
setting forth in four lines,
THE CHIEF MOURNER,
the Duchess of Norfolk
(veiled)
Attended by a Lady,
is like a bad play-bill. The announcement how 'the Arch-
bishop having concluded the service, Garter will pronounce
near the grave the style of Her late Majesty; after which
the Lord Chamberlain and the Vice Chamberlain of Her late
Majesty's household will break their staves of office, and,
COURT CEREMOXIES 109
kneeling, deposit the same in the Royal Vault,' is more like
the announcement outside a booth at a fair, respecting what
the elephant or the conjurer will do within, by and by, than
consists with the simple solemnity of that last Christian serv-
ice which is entered upon with the words, 'We brought noth-
ing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be
the name of the Lord.'
We would not be misunderstood on this point, and we wish
distinctly to express our full belief that the funeral of the
good Dowager Queen was conducted with a proper absence
of conventional absurdity. We are persuaded that the
highest personages in the country respected the last wishes
so modestly expressed, and were earnest in impressing upon
all concerned a desire for their exact fulfilment. It is not
so much because of any inconsistencies on this particular
occasion, as because the Lord Chamberlain's office is the last
stronghold of an enormous amount of tomfoolery, which is
infinitely better done upon the stage in Tom Thumb, which is
cumbrous and burdensome to all outside the office itself, and
which is negative for any good purpose and often positive
for much harm, as making things ridiculous or repulsive
which can only exist beneficially in the general love and
respect, that we take this occasion of hoping that it is fast
on the decline.
This is not the first occasion on which we have observed
upon the preposterous constraints and forms that set a mark
upon the English Court among the nations of Europe, and
amaze European Sovereigns when they first become its
guests. In times that are marked beyond all others by ra-
pidity of change, and by the condensation of centuries into
years in respect of great advances, it is in the nature of
things that these constraints and forms should yearly, daily,
hourly, become more preposterous. What was obsolete at
first, is rendered in such circumstances, a thousand times
more obsolete by every new stride that is made in the onward
road. A Court that does not keep pace with a People will
look smaller, through the tube which Mr. Stephenson is throw-
ing across the Menai Straits, than it looked before.
It is typical of the English Court that its state dresses,
though greatly in advance of its ceremonies, are always be-
hind the time. We would bring it up to the time, that it
may have the greater share in, and the stronger hold upon,
the affections of the time. The spectacle of a Court going
down to Windsor by the Great Western Railway, to do, from
morning to night, what is five hundred years out of date ; or
sending such messages to Garter by electric telegraph, as
Garter might have received in the lists, in the days of King
Richard the First, is not a good one. The example of the
Dowager Queen, reviving and improving on the example
of the late Duke of Sussex, makes the present no unfit occa-
sion for the utterance of a hope that these things are at last
progressing, changing, and resolving themselves into har-
mony with all other things around them. It is particularly
important that this should be the case when a new line of
Sovereigns is stretching out before us. It is particularly
important that this should be the case when the hopes, the
happiness, the property, the liberties, the lives of innumer-
able people may, and in great measure must, depend on
Royal Childhood not being too thickly hedged in, or loftily
walled round, from a great range of human sympathy, access,
and knowledge. Therefore we could desire to have the
words of their departed relative, 'We are all alike before
the throne of God,' commended to the earliest understanding
of our rising Princes and Princesses. Therefore we could
desire to bring the chief of the Court ceremonies a little more
into the outer world, and cordially to give him the greeting,
My good Lord Chamberlain,
Well are you welcome to this open air I
MISCELLANIES
FROM
'HOUSEHOLD WORDS
1850-1859
ADDRESS IN THE FIRST NUMBER OF
'HOUSEHOLD WORDS'
[MARCH 30, 1850]
A PRELIMINARY WORD
THE name that we have chosen for this publication expresses,
generally, the desire we have at heart in originating it.
We aspire to live in the Household affections, and to be
numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers.
We hope to be the comrade and friend of many thousands of
people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, on
whose faces we may never look. We seek to bring into in-
numerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the
knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are
not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering
in ourselves, less tolerant of one another, less faithful in the
progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living
in the summer-dawn of time.
No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to
grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words.
In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of
the poor, we would tenderly cherish that light of Fancy
which is inherent in the human breast ; which, according to its
nurture, burns with an inspiring flame, or sinks into a sullen
glare, but which (or woe betide that day!) can never be ex-
tinguished. To show to all, that in all familiar things, even
in those which are repellent on the surface, there is Romance
enough, if we will find it out: — to teach the hardest workers
at this whirling wheel of toil, that their lot is not necessarily
a moody, brutal fact, excluded from the sympathies and
graces of imagination ; to bring the greater and the lesser in
degree, together, upon that wild field, and mutually dispose
113
114
them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding
— is one main object of our Household Words.
The mightier inventions of this age are not, to our think-
ing, all material, but have a kind of souls in their stupen-
dous bodies which may find expression in Household Words.
The traveller whom we accompany on his railroad or his
steamboat journey, may gain, we hope, some compensation
for incidents which these later generations have outlived, in
new associations with the Power that bears him onward ; with
the habitations and the ways of life of crowds of his fellow-
creatures among whom he passes like the wind; even with
the towering chimneys he may see, spirting out fire and
smoke upon the prospect. The Swart giants, Slaves of the
Lamp of Knowledge, have their thousand and one tales, no
less than the Genii of the East; and these, in all their wild,
grotesque, and fanciful aspects, in all their many phases of
endurance, in all their many moving lessons of compassion
and consideration, we design to tell.
Our Household Words will not be echoes of the present
time alone, but of the past too. Neither will they treat of
the hopes, the enterprises, triumphs, joys, and sorrows, of
this country only, but, in some degree, of those of every
nation upon earth. For nothing can be a source of real
interest in one of them, without concerning all the rest.
We have considered what an ambition it is to be admitted
into many homes with affection and confidence ; to be re-
garded as a friend by children and old people ; to be thought
of in affliction and in happiness ; to people the sick-room with
airy shapes 'that give delight and hurt not,' and to be asso-
ciated with the harmless laughter and the gentle tears of
many hearths. We know the great responsibility of such a
privilege; its vast reward; the pictures that it conjures up,
in hours of solitary labour, of a multitude moved by one
sympathy ; the solemn hopes which it awakens in the la-
bourer's breast, that he may be free from self-reproach in
looking back at last upon his work, and that his name may be
remembered in his race in time to come, and borne by the
dear objects of his love with pride. The hand that writes
these faltering lines, happily associated with some Household
ADDRESS IN 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS' 115
Words before to-day, has known enough of such expe-
riences to enter in an earnest spirit upon this new task, and
»*dth an awakened sense of all that it involves.
Some tillers of the field, into which we now come, have
been before us, and some are here whose high usefulness we
readily acknowledge, and whose company it is an honour to
join. But there are others here — Bastards of the Mountain,
draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest
passions of the lowest natures — whose existence is a national
reproach. And these we should consider it our highest serv-
ice to displace.
Thus, we begin our career! The adventurer in the old
fairy story, climbing towards the summit of a steep eminence
on which the object of his search was stationed, was sur-
rounded by a roar of voices, crying to him, from the stones
in the way, to turn back. All the voices we hear, cry Go on !
The stones that call to us have sermons in them, as the trees
have tongues, as there are books in the running brooks, as
there is good in everything! They, and the Time, cry out
to us Go on 1 With a fresh heart, a light step, and a hope-
ful courage, we begin the journey. The road is not so rough
that it need daunt our feet: the way is not so steep that we
need stop for breath, and, looking faintly down, be stricken
motionless. Go on, is all we hear, Go on ! In a glow already,
with the air from yonder height upon us, and the inspiriting
voices joining in this acclamation, we echo back the cry, and
go on cheerily !
ANNOUNCEMENT IN 'HOUSEHOLD
WORDS' OF THE APPROACHING PUB-
LICATION OF 'ALL THE YEAR ROUND'
[MAY 28, 1859]
AFTER the appearance of the present concluding Number of
Household Words, this publication will merge into the new
weekly publication, All the Year Round, and the title, House-
116 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
hold Words, will form a part of the title-page of All the
Year Round.
The Prospectus of the latter Journal describes it in these
words :
'ADDRESS
'Nine years of Household Words, are the best practical
assurance that can be offered to the public, of the spirit and
objects of All the Year Round.
'In transferring myself, and my strongest energies, from
the publication that is about to be discontinued, to the pub-
lication that is about to be begun, I have the happiness of
taking with me the staff of writers with whom I have laboured,
and all the literary and business co-operation that can make
my work a pleasure. In some important respects, I am now
free greatly to advance on past arrangements. Those, I
leave to testify for themselves in due course.
'That fusion of the graces of the imagination with the
realities of life, which is vital to the welfare of any commu-
nity, and for which I have striven from week to week as hon-
estly as I could during the last nine years, will continue to
be striven for "all the year round." The old weekly cares
and duties become things of the Past, merely to be assumed,
with an increased love for them and brighter hopes springing
out of them, in the Present and the Future.
'I look, and plan, for a very much wider circle of readers,
and yet again for a steadily expanding circle of readers, in
the projects I hope to carry through "all the year round."
And I feel confident that this expectation will be realised, if
it deserve realisation.
*The task of my new journal is set, and it will steadily try
to work the task out. Its pages shall show to what good pur-
pose their motto is remembered in them, and with how much
of fidelity and earnestness they tell
the story of our lives from year to year.
CHARLES DICKENS.'
ADDRESS IN 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS' 117
Since this was issued, the Journal itself has come into
existence, and has spoken for itself five weeks. Its fifth Num-
ber is published to-day, and its circulation, moderately stated,
trebles that now relinquished in Household Words.
In referring our readers, henceforth, to All the Year
Round, we can but assure them afresh, of our unwearying and
faithful service, in what is at once the work and the chief
pleasure of our life. Through all that we are doing, and
through all that we design to do, our aim is to do our best
in sincerity of purpose, and true devotion of spirit.
We do not for a moment suppose that we may lean on the
character of these pages, and rest contented at the point
where they stop. We see in that point but a starting-place
for our new journey; and on that journey, with new pros-
pects opening out before us everywhere, we joyfully proceed,
entreating our readers — without any of the pain of leave-
taking incidental to most journeys — to bear us company All
the year round.
ADDRESS IN 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS'
[MAY 28, 1859]
A LAST HOUSEHOLD WORD
THE first page of the first of these Nineteen Volumes, was
devoted to a Preliminary Word from the writer by whom they
were projected, under whose constant supervision they have
been produced, and whose name has been (as his pen and him-
self have been), inseparable from the Publication ever since.
The last page of the last of these Nineteen Volumes, is
closed by the same hand.
He knew perfectly well, knowing his own rights, and his
means of attaining them, that it could not be but that this
Work must stop, if he chose to stop it. He therefore an-
nounced, many weeks ago, that it would be discontinued on
the day on which this final Number bears date. The Public
have read a great deal to the contrary, and will observe that"
it has not in the least affected the result.
118 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE
I
[MAKCH 30, 1850]
As one half of the world is said not to know how the other
half lives, so it may be affirmed that the upper half of the
world neither knows nor greatly cares how the lower half
amuses itself. Believing that it does not care, mainly because
it does not know, we purpose occasionally recording a few
facts on this subject.
The general character of the lower class of dramatic amuse-
ments is a very significant sign of a people, and a very good
test of their intellectual condition. We design to make our
readers acquainted in the first place with a few of our experi-
ences under this head in the metropolis.
It is probable that nothing will ever root out from among
the common people an innate love they have for dramatic
entertainment in some form or other. It would be a very
doubtful benefit to society, we think, if it could be rooted out.
The Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street, where an infi-
nite variety of ingenious models are exhibited and explained,
and where lectures comprising a quantity of useful informa-
tion on many practical subjects are delivered, is a great
public benefit and a wonderful place, but we think a people
formed entirely in their hours of leisure by Polytechnic
Institutions would be an uncomfortable community. We
would rather not have to appeal to the generous sympathies
of a man of five-and-twenty, in respect of some affliction of
which he had had no personal experience, who had passed
all his holidays, when a boy, among cranks and cogwheels.
We should be more disposed to trust him if he had been
brought into occasional contact with a Maid and a Magpie ;
if he had made one or two diversions into the Forest of
Bondy ; or had even gone the length of a Christmas Panto-
mime. There is a range of imagination in most of us, which
no amount of steam-engines will satisfy; and which The-
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 119
great-exhibition-of-the-works-of-industry-of - all - nations, it-
self, will probably leave unappeased. The lower we go, the
more natural it is that the best relished provision for this
should be found in dramatic entertainments ; as at once the
most obvious, the least troublesome, and the most real, of all
escapes out of the literal world. Joe Whelks, of the New
Cut, Lambeth, is not much of a reader, has no great store
of books, no very commodious room to read in, no very
decided inclination to read, and no power at all of presenting
vividly before his mind's eye what he reads about. But put
Joe in the gallery of the Victoria Theatre ; show him doors
and windows in the scene that will open and shut, and that
people can get in and out of ; tell him a story with these aids,
and by the help of live men and women dressed up, confiding
to him their innermost secrets, in voices audible half a mile off ;
and Joe will unravel a story through all its entanglements,
and sit there as long after midnight as you have anything
left to show him. Accordingly, the Theatres to which Mr.
Whelks resorts, are always full ; and whatever changes of
fashion the drama knows elsewhere, it is always fashionable
in the New Cut.
The question, then, might not unnaturally arise, one would
suppose, whether Mr. Whelks's education is at all susceptible
of improvement, through the agency of his theatrical tastes.
How far it is improved at present, our readers shall judge
for themselves.
In affording them the means of doing so, we wish to dis-
claim any grave imputation on those who are concerned in
ministering to the dramatic gratification of Mr. Whelks.
Heavily taxed, wholly unassisted by the State, deserted by
the gentry, and quite unrecognised as a means of public
instruction, the higher English Drama has declined. Those
who would live to please Mr. Whelks, must please Mr. Whelks
to live. It is not the Manager's province to hold the Mirror
up to Nature, but to Mr. Whelks — the only person who ac-
knowledges him. If, in like manner, the actor's nature, like
the dyer's hand, becomes subdued to what he works in, the
actor can hardly be blamed for it. He grinds hard at his
vocation, is often steeped in direful poverty, and lives, at the
120 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
best, in a little world of mockeries. It is bad enough to give
away a great estate six nights a-week, and want a shilling;
to preside at imaginary banquets, hungry for a mutton chop ;
to smack the lips over a tankard of toast and water, and
declaim about the mellow produce of the sunny vineyard on
the banks of the Rhine ; to be a rattling young lover, with the
measles at home; and to paint sorrow over, with burnt cork
and rouge; without being called upon to despise his voca-
tion too. If he can utter the trash to which he is condemned,
with any relish, so much the better for him, Heaven knows;
and peace be with him !
A few weeks ago, we went to one of Mr. Whelks's favourite
Theatres, to see an attractive Melo-Drama called May Morn-
ing, or The Mystery of 1715, and the Murder! We had an
idea that the former of these titles might refer to the month
in which either the mystery or the murder happened, but we
found it to be the name of the heroine, the pride of Keswick
Vale; who was 'called May Morning' (after a common cus-
tom among the English Peasantry) 'from her bright eyes and
merry laugh.' Of this young lady, it may be observed, in
passing, that she subsequently sustained every possible calam-
ity of human existence, in a white muslin gown with blue
tucks ; and that she did every conceivable and inconceivable
thing with a pistol, that could anyhow be effected by that
description of fire-arms.
The Theatre was extremely full. The prices of admission
were, to the boxes, a shilling; to the pit, sixpence; to the
gallery, threepence. The gallery was of enormous dimen-
sions (among the company, in the front row, we observed
Mr. Whelks); and overflowing with occupants. It required
no close observation of the attentive faces, rising one above
another, to the very door in the roof, and squeezed and
jammed in, regardless of all discomforts, even there, to im-
press a stranger with a sense of its being highly desirable to
lose no possible chance of effecting any mental improvement
in that great audience.
The company in the pit were not very clean or sweet-
savoured, but there were some good-humoured young me-
chanics among them, with their wives. These were generally
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 121
accompanied by 'the baby,' insomuch that the pit was a per-
fect nursery. No effect made on the stage was so curious,
as the looking down on the quiet faces of these babies fast
asleep, after looking up at the staring sea of heads in the
gallery. There were a good many cold fried soles in the pit,
besides ; and a variety of flat stone bottles, of all portable
sizes.
The audience in the boxes was of much the same character
(babies and fish excepted) as the audience in the pit. A pri-
vate in the Foot Guards sat in the next box ; and a personage
who wore pins on his coat instead of buttons, and was in such
a damp habit of living as to be quite mouldy, was our nearest
neighbour. In several parts of the house we noticed some
young pickpockets of our acquaintance ; but as they were
evidentl}* there as private individuals, and not in their public
capacity, we were little disturbed by their presence. For we
consider the hours of idleness passed by this class of society
as so much gain to society at large; and we do not join in a
whimsical sort of lamentation that is generally made over
them, when they are found to be unoccupied.
As we made these observations the curtain rose, and we
were presently in possession of the following particulars.
Sir George Elmore, a melancholy Baronet with every
appearance of being in that advanced stage of indigestion
in which Mr. Morrison's patients usually are, when they hap-
pen to hear through Mr. Moat, of the surprising effects of
his Vegetable Pills, was found to be living in a very large
castle, in the society of one round table, two chairs, and Cap-
tain George Elmore, 'his supposed son, the Child of Mystery,
and the Man of Crime.' The Captain, in addition to an
undutiful habit of bullying his father on all occasions, was
a prey to many vices : foremost among which may be men-
tioned his desertion of his wife, 'Estella de Neva, a Spanish
lady,' and his determination unlawfully to possess himself of
May Morning ; M. M. being then on the eve of marriage to
Will Stanmore, a cheerful sailor, with very loose legs.
The strongest evidence, at first, of the Captain's being the
Child of Mystery and the Man of Crime was deducible from
his boots, which, being very high and wide, and apparently
122 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
made of sticking-plaister, justified the worst theatrical sus-
picions to his disadvantage. And indeed he presently turned
out as ill as could be desired: getting into May Morning's
Cottage by the window after dark ; refusing to 'unhand' May
Morning when required to do so by that lady; waking May
Morning's only surviving parent, a blind old gentleman with
a black ribbon over his eyes, whom we shall call Mr. Stars,
as his name was stated in the bill thus * * * and showing
himself desperately bent on carrying off May Morning by
force of arms. Even this was not the worst of the Captain ;
for, being foiled in his diabolical purpose — temporarily by
means of knives and pistols, providentially caught up and
directed at him by May Morning, and finally, for the time
being, by the advent of Will Stanmore — he caused one Slink,
his adherent, to denounce Will Stanmore as a rebel, and got
that cheerful mariner carried off, and shut up in prison. At
about the same period of the Captain's career, there suddenly
appeared in his father's castle, a dark complexioned lady of
the name of Manuella, *a Zingara Woman from the Pyrenean
Mountains ; the Wild Wanderer of the Heath, and the Pro-
nouncer of the Prophecy,' who threw the melancholy baronet,
his supposed father, into the greatest confusion by asking
him what he had upon his conscience, and by pronouncing
mysterious rhymes concerning the Child of Mystery and the
Man of Crime, to a low trembling of fiddles. Matters were
in this state when the Theatre resounded with applause, and
Mr. Whelks fell into a fit of unbounded enthusiasm, conse-
quent on the entrance of 'Michael the Mendicant.'
At first we referred something of the cordiality with which
Michael the Mendicant was greeted, to the fact of his being
*made up' with an excessively dirty face, which might create
a bond of union between himself and a large majority of the
audience. But it soon came out that Michael the Mendicant
had been hired in old time by Sir George Elmore, to murder
his (Sir George Elmore's) elder brother — which he had done;
notwithstanding which little affair of honour, Michael was in
reality a very good fellow ; quite a tender-hearted man ; who,
on hearing of the Captain's determination to settle Will
Stanmore, cried out, 'What! more bel-ood!' and fell flat —
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 123
overpowered by his nice sense of humanity. In like manner,
in describing that small error of judgment into which he had
allowed himself to be tempted by money, this gentleman ex-
claimed, 'I ster-ruck him down, and fel-ed in er-orror!' and
further he remarked, with honest pride, 'I have liveder as a
beggar — a roadersider vaigerant, but no ker-rime since then
has stained these hands !' All these sentiments of the worthy
man were hailed with showers of applause; and when, in the
excitement of his feelings on one occasion, after a soliloquy,
he 'went off' on his back, kicking and shuffling along the
ground, after the manner of bold spirits in trouble, who object
to be taken to the station-house, the cheering was tremendous.
And to see how little harm he had done, after all ! Sir
George Elmore's elder brother was NOT dead. Not he ! He
recovered, after this sensitive creature had 'fel-ed in er-orror,'
and, putting a black ribbon over his eyes to disguise himself,
went and lived in a modest retirement with his only child. In
short, Mr. Stars was the identical individual ! When Will
Stanmore turned out to be the wrongful Sir George Elmore's
son, instead of the Child of Mystery and the Man of Crime,
who turned out to be Michael's son (a change having been
effected, in revenge, by the lady from the Pyrenean Moun-
tains, who became the Wild Wanderer of the Heath, in con-
sequence of the wrongful Sir George Elmore's perfidy to her
and desertion of her), Mr. Stars went up to the Castle, and
mentioned to his murdering brother how it was. Mr. Stars
said it was all right ; he bore no malice ; he had kept out of
the way, in order that his murdering brother (to whose
numerous virtues he was no stranger) might enjoy the prop-
erty ; and now he would propose that they should make it up
and dine together. The murdering brother immediately con-
sented, embraced the Wild Wanderer, and it is supposed sent
instructions to Doctors' Commons for a license to marry her.
After which, they were all very comfortable indeed. For it
is not much to try to murder your brother for the sake of his
property, if you only suborn such a delicate assassin as
Michael the Mendicant!
All this did not tend to the satisfaction of the Child of
Mystery and Man of Crime, who was so little pleased by the
124 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
general happiness, that he shot Will Stanmore, now joyfully
out of prison and going to be married directly to May Morn-
ing, and carried off the body, and May Morning to boot, to
a lone hut. Here, Will Stanmore, laid out for dead at fifteen
minutes past twelve, P.M., arose at seventeen minutes past,
infinitely fresher than most daisies, and fought two strong
men single-handed. However, the Wild Wanderer, arriving
with a party of male wild wanderers, who were always at her
disposal — and the murdering brother arriving arm-in-arm
with Mr. Stars — stopped the combat, confounded the Child of
Mystery and Man of Crime, and blessed the lovers.
The adventures of Red Riven the Bandit concluded the
moral lesson of the evening. But, feeling by this time a lit-
tle fatigued, and believing that we already discerned in the
countenance of Mr. Whelks a sufficient confusion between
right and wrong to last him for one night, we retired: the
rather as we intended to meet him, shortly, at another place
of dramatic entertainment for the people.
II
[APRIL SO, 1850]
MR. WHELKS being much in the habit of recreating himself
at a class of theatres called 'Saloons,' we repaired to one of
these, not long ago, on a Monday evening ; Monday being a
great holiday-night with Mr. Whelks and his friends.
The Saloon in question is the largest in London (that which
is known as the Eagle, in the City Road, should be excepted
from the generic term, as not presenting by any means the
same class of entertainment), and is situate not far from
Shoreditch Church. It announces 'The People's Theatre,'
as its second name. The prices of admission are, to the boxes,
a shilling; to the pit, sixpence; to the lower gallery, four-
pence; to the upper gallery and back seats, threepence.
There is no half-price. The opening piece on this occasion
was described in the bills as 'The greatest hit of the season,
the grand new legendary and traditionary drama, oombiu-
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 125
ing supernatural agencies with historical facts, and identify-
ing extraordinary superhuman causes with material, terrific,
and powerful effects.' All the queen's horses and all the
queen's men could not have drawn Mr. Whelks into the place
like this description. Strengthened by lithographic repre-
sentations of the principal superhuman causes, combined with
the most popular of the material, terrific, and powerful effects,
it became irresistible. Consequently, we had already failed,
once, in finding six square inches of room within the walls,
to stand upon ; and when we now paid our money for a little
stage box, like a dry shower-bath, we did so in the midst of a
stream of people who persisted on paying theirs for other
parts of the house in despite of the representations of the
Money-taker that it was 'very full, everywhere.'
The outer avenues and passages of the People's Theatre
bore abundant testimony to the fact of its being frequented
by very dirty people. Within, the atmosphere was far from
odoriferous. The place was crammed to excess, in all parts.
Among the audience were a large number of boys and youths,
and a great many very young girls grown into bold women
before they had well ceased to be children. These last were
the worst features of the whole crowd and were more prom-
inent there than in any other sort of public assembly that
we know of, except at a public execution. There was no
drink supplied, beyond the contents of the porter-can (mag-
nified in its dimensions, perhaps), which may be usually seen
traversing the galleries of the largest Theatres as well as the
least, and which was here seen everywhere. Huge ham sand-
wiches, piled on trays like deals in a timber-yard, were handed
about for sale to the hungry; and there was no stint of
oranges, cakes, brandy-balls, or other similar refreshments.
The Theatre was capacious, with a very large, capable stage,
well lighted, well appointed, and managed in a business-like,
orderly manner in all respects; the performances had begun
so early as a quarter past six, and had been then in progress
for three-quarters of an hour.
It was apparent here, as in the theatre we had previously
visited, that one of the reasons of its great attraction was its
being directly addressed to the common people, in the pro-
126 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
vision made for their seeing and hearing. Instead of being
put away in a dark gap in the roof of an immense building,
as in our once National Theatres, they were here in posses-
sion of eligible points of view, and thoroughly able to take
in the whole performance. Instead of being at a great dis-
advantage in comparison with the mass of the audience, they
were here the audience, for whose accommodation the place was
made. We believe this to be one great cause of the success
of these speculations. In whatever way the common people
are addressed, whether in churches, chapels, schools, lecture-
rooms, or theatres, to be successfully addressed they must
be directly appealed to. No matter how good the feast, they
will not come to it on mere sufferance. If, on looking round
us, we find that the only things plainly and personally ad-
dressed to them, from quack medicines upwards, be bad or
very defective things, — so much the worse for them and for
all of us, and so much the more unjust and absurd the sys-
tem which has haughtily abandoned a strong ground to such
occupation.
We will add that we believe these people have a right to be
amused. A great deal that we consider to be unreasonable, is
written and talked about not licensing these places of
entertainment. We have already intimated that we believe
a love of dramatic representations to be an inherent prin-
ciple in human nature. In most conditions of human life of
which we have any knowledge, from the Greeks to the Bosjes-
men, some form of dramatic representation has always ob-
tained.1 We have a vast respect for county magistrates, and
for the lord chamberlain ; but we render greater deference
to such extensive and immutable experience, and think it
will outlive the whole existing court and commission. We
i In the remote interior of Africa, and among the North American
Indians, this truth is exemplified in an equally striking manner. Who
that saw the four grim, stunted, abject Bush-people at the Egyptian
Hall * — with two natural actors among them out of that number, one a
male and the other a female — can forget how something human and
imaginative gradually broke out in the little ugly man, when he was
roused from crouching over the charcoal fire, into giving a dramatic
representation of the tracking of a beast, the shooting of it with
poisoned arrows, and the creature's death?
* See The A merican Panorama.
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 127
would assuredly not bear harder on the fourpenny theatre,
than on the four shilling theatre, or the four guinea theatre ;
but we would decidedly interpose to turn to some whole-
some account the means of instruction which it has at com-
mand, and we would make that office of Dramatic Licenser,
which, like many other offices, has become a mere piece of
Court favour and dandy conventionality, a real, responsible,
educational trust. We would have it exercise a sound super-
vision over the lower drama, instead of stopping the career
of a real work of art, as it did in the case of Mr. Chorley's
play at the Surrey Theatre, but a few weeks since, for a
sickly point of form.
To return to Mr. Whelks. The audience, being able to
see and hear, were very attentive. They were so closely
packed, that they took a little time in settling down after
any pause ; but otherwise the general disposition was to lose
nothing, and to check (in no choice language) any disturber
of the business of the scene.
On our arrival, Mr. Whelks had already followed Lady
Hatton the Heroine (whom we faintly recognised as a muti-
lated theme of the late Thomas Ingoldsby) to the 'Gloomy
Dell and Suicide's Tree,' where Lady H. had encountered the
'apparition of the dark man of doom,' and heard the 'fearful
story of the Suicide.' She had also 'signed the compact in
her own Blood' ; beheld 'the Tombs rent asunder' ; seen 'skele-
tons start from their graves, and gibber Mine, mine, for
ever!' and undergone all these little experiences (each set
forth in a separate line in the bill) in the compass of one
act. It was not yet over, indeed, for we found a remote king
of England of the name of 'Enerry,' refreshing himself with
the spectacle of a dance in a Garden, which was interrupted
by the 'thrilling appearance of the Demon.' This 'super-
human cause* (with black eyebrows slanting up into his tem-
ples, and red-foil cheekbones,) brought the Drop-Curtain
down as we took possession of our Shower-Bath.
It seemed, on the curtain's going up again, that Lady
Hatton had sold herself to the Powers of Darkness, on very
high terms, and was now overtaken by remorse, and by jeal-
ousy too; the latter passion being excited by the beautiful
128 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Lady Rodolpha, ward to the king. It was to urge Lady
Hatton on to the murder of this young female (as well as
we could make out, but both we and Mr. Whelks found the
incidents complicated) that the Demon appeared 'once again
in all his terrors.' Lady Hatton had been leading a life of
piety, but the Demon was not to have his bargain declared
off, in right of any such artifices, and now offered a dagger
for the destruction of Rodolpha. Lady Hatton hesitating
to accept this trifle from Tartarus, the Demon, for certain
subtle reasons of his own, proceeded to entertain her with a
view of the 'gloomy court-yard of a convent,' and the
apparitions of the 'Skeleton Monk,' and the 'King of Ter-
rors.' Against these superhuman causes, another superhuman
cause, to wit, the ghost of Lady H.'s mother came into play,
and greatly confounded the Powers of Darkness, by waving
the 'sacred emblem' over the head of the else devoted Rodol-
pha, and causing her to sink unto the earth. Upon this
the Demon, losing his temper, fiercely invited Lady Hatton to
'Be-old the tortures of the damned!' and straightway con-
veyed her to a 'grand and awful view of Pandemonium, and
Lake of Transparent Rolling Fire,' whereof, and also of
'Prometheus chained, and the Vulture gnawing at his liver,'
Mr. Whelks was exceedingly derisive.
The Demon still failing, even there, and still finding the
ghost of the old lady greatly in his way, exclaimed that these
vexations had such a remarkable effect upon his spirit as to
'sear his eyeballs,' and that he must go 'deeper down,' which
he accordingly did. Hereupon it appeared that it was all
a dream on Lady Hatton's part, and that she was newly mar-
ried and uncommonly happy. This put an end to the in-
congruous heap of nonsense, and set Mr. Whelks applauding
mightily; for, except with the lake of transparent rolling
fire (which was not half infernal enough for him) Mr. Whelks
was infinitely contented with the whole of the proceedings.
Ten thousand people, every week, all the year round, are
estimated to attend this place of amusement. If it were closed
to-morrow — if there were fifty such, and they were all closed
to-morrow — the only result would be to cause that to be
privately and evasively done, which is now publicly done; to
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 129
render the harm of it much greater, and to exhibit the sup-
pressive power of the law in an oppressive and partial light.
The people who now resort here, will be amused somewhere.
It is of no use to blink that fact, or to make pretences to the
contrary. We had far better apply ourselves to improving
the character of their amusement. It would not be exacting
much, or exacting anything very difficult, to require that the
pieces represented in these Theatres should have, at least, a
good, plain, healthy purpose in them.
To the end that our experiences might not be supposed to
be partial or unfortunate, we went, the very next night, to the
Theatre where we saw May Morning, and found Mr. Whelks
engaged in the study of an 'Original old English Domestic
and Romantic Drama,' called Eva the Betrayed, or The Ladye
of Lambythe. We proceed to develop the incidents which
gradually unfolded themselves to Mr. Whelks's understanding.
One Geoffrey Thornley the younger, on a certain fine
morning, married his father's ward, Eva the Betrayed, the
Ladye of Lambythe. She had become the betrayed, in right
• — or in wrong — of designing Geoffrey's machinations ; for
that corrupt individual, knowing her to be under promise of
marriage to Walter More, a young mariner (of whom he
was accustomed to make slighting mention as *a minion'),
represented the said More to be no more, and obtained the
consent of the too trusting Eva to their immediate union.
Now, it came to pass, by a singular coincidence, that on
the identical morning of the marriage, More came home, and
was taking a walk about the scenes of his boyhood — a little
faded since that time — when he rescued 'Wilbert the Hunch-
back' from some very rough treatment. This misguided per-
son, in return, immediately fell to abusing his preserver in
round terms, giving him to understand that he (the pre-
served) hated 'manerkind, wither two eckerceptions/ one of
them being the deceiving Geoffrey, whose retainer he was,
and for whom he felt an unconquerable attachment ; the
other, a relative, whom, in a similar redundancy of emphasis,
adapted to the requirements of Mr. Whelks, he called his
'assister.' This misanthrope also made the cold-blooded
declaration, 'There was a timer when I loved my fellow kere-
130 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
hires, till they deserpised me. Now, I live only to witness
man's disergherace and woman's misery !' In furtherance of
this amiable purpose of existence, he directed More to where
the bridal procession was coming home from church, and Eva
recognised More, and More reproached Eva, and there was
a great to-do, and a violent struggling, before certain social
villagers who were celebrating the event with morris-dances.
Eva was borne off in a tearing condition, and the bill very
truly observed that the end of that part of the business was
'despair and madness.'
Geoffrey, Geoffrey, why were you already married to an-
other! Why could you not be true to your lawful wife
Katherine, instead of deserting her, and leaving her to come
tumbling into public-houses (on account of weakness) in
search of you ! You might have known what it would end
in, Geoffrey Thornley ! You might have known that she
would come up to your house on your wedding day with
her marriage-certificate in her pocket, determined to expose
'you. You might have known beforehand, as you now very
composedly observe, that you would have 'but one course to
pursue.' That course clearly is to wind your right hand in
Katherine's long hair, wrestle with her, stab her, throw down
the body behind the door (cheers from Mr. Whelks), and tell
the devoted Hunchback to get rid of it. On the devoted
Hunchback's finding that it is the body of his 'assister,'
and taking her marriage-certificate from her pocket and
denouncing you, of course you have still but one course to
pursue, and that is to charge the crime upon him, and have
him carried off with all speed into the 'deep and massive
dungeons beneath Thornley Hall.'
More having, as he was rather given to boast, 'a goodly
vessel on the lordly Thames,' had better have gone away with
it, weather permitting, than gone after Eva. Naturally, he
got carried down to the dungeons, too, for lurking about,
and got put into the next dungeon to the Hunchback, then
expiring from poison. And there they were, hard and fast,
like two wild beasts in dens, trying to get glimpses of each
other through the bars, to the unutterable interest of MR.
WHELKS.
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 131
But when the Hunchback made himself known, and when
More did the same ; and when the Hunchback said he had got
the certificate which rendered Eva's marriage illegal ; and
when More raved to have it given to him, and when the
Hunchback (as having some grains of misanthropy in him
to the last) persisted in going into his dying agonies in a
remote corner of his cage, and took unheard-of trouble not
to die anywhere near the bars that were within More's reach ;
Mr. Whelks applauded to the echo. At last the Hunchback
was persuaded to stick the certificate on the point of a
dagger, and hand it in ; and that done, died extremely hard,
knocking himself violently about, to the very last gasp, and
certainly making the most of all the life that was in him.
Still, More had yet to get out of his den before he
could turn this certificate to any account. His first step was
to make such a violent uproar as to bring into his presence
a certain 'Norman Free Lance' who kept watch and ward
over him. His second, to inform this warrior, in the style of
the Polite Letter-Writer, that 'circumstances had occurred'
rendering it necessary that he should be immediately let out.
The warrior declining to submit himself to the force of these
circumstances, Mr. More proposed to him, as a gentleman
and a man of honour, to allow him to step out into the
gallery, and there adjust an old feud subsisting between
them, by single combat. The unwary Free Lance, consenting
to this reasonable proposal, was shot from behind by the
comic man, whom he bitterly designated as 'a snipe' for that
action, and then died exceedingly game.
All this occurred in one day — the bridal day of the Ladye
of Lambythe ; and now Mr. Whelks concentrated all his
energies into a focus, bent forward, looked straight in front
of him, and held his breath. For, the night of the eventful
day being come, Mr. Whelks was admitted to the 'bridal
chamber of the Ladye of Lambythe,' where he beheld a toilet
table, and a particularly large and desolate four-posf bed-
stead. Here the Ladye, having dismissed her bridesmaids,
was interrupted in deploring her unhappy fate, by the en-
trance of her husband; and matters, under these circum-
stances, were proceeding to very desperate extremities, when
182 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the Ladye (by this time aware of the existence of the
certificate) found a dagger on the dressing-table, and said,
'Attempt to enfold me in thy pernicious embrace, and this
poignard — !' etc. He did attempt it, however, for all that,
and he and the Ladye were dragging one another about like
wrestlers, when Mr. More broke open the door, and entering
with the whole domestic establishment and a Middlesex mag-
istrate, took him into custody and claimed his bride.
It is but fair to Mr. Whelks to remark on one curious fact
in this entertainment. When the situations were very strong
indeed, they were very like what some favourite situations in
the Italian Opera would be to a profoundly deaf spectator.
The despair and madness at the end of the first act, the busi-
ness of the long hair, and the struggle in the bridal chamber,
were as like the conventional passion of the Italian singers,
as the orchestra was unlike the opera band, or its 'hurries'
unlike the music of the great composers. So do extremes
meet ; and so is there some hopeful congeniality between what
will excite Mr. Whelks, and what will rouse a Duchess.
PERFECT FELICITY
IN A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW
[APRIL 6, 1850]
I AM the Raven in the Happy Family — and nobody knows
what a life of misery I lead !
The dog informs me (he was a puppy about town before
he joined us; which was lately) that there is more than one
Happy Family on view in London. Mine, I beg to say, may
be known by being the Family which contains a splendid
Raven.
I want to know why I am to be called upon to accommo-
date myself to a cat, a mouse, a pigeon, a ringdove, an owl
(who is the greatest ass I have ever known), a guinea-pig, a
sparrow, and a variety of other creatures with whom I have
PERFECT FELICITY 133
no opinion in common. Is this national education? Be-
cause, if it is, I object to it. Is our cage what they call
neutral ground, on which all parties may agree? If so, war
to the beak I consider preferable.
What right has any man to require me to look compla-
cently at a cat on a shelf all day? It may be all very well
for the owl. My opinion of him is that he blinks and stares
himself into a state of such dense stupidity that he has no
idea what company he is in. I have seen him, with my own
eyes, blink himself, for hours, into the conviction that he was
alone in a belfry. But 7 am not the owl. It would have been
better for me, if I had been born in that station of life.
I am a Raven. I am, by nature, a sort of collector, or
antiquarian. If I contributed, in my natural state, to any
Periodical, it would be The Gentleman's Magazine. I have
a passion for amassing things that are of no use to me, and
burying them. Supposing such a thing — I don't wish it to
be' known to our proprietor that I put this case, but I say,
supposing such a thing — as that I took out one of the
Guinea-Pig's eyes; how could I bury it here? The floor of
the cage is not an inch thick. To be sure, I could dig
through it with my bill (if I dared), but what would be the
comfort of dropping a Guinea-Pig's eye into Regent Street?
What I want, is privacy. I want to make a collection. I
desire to get a little property together. How can I do it
here? Mr. Hudson couldn't have done it, under correspond-
ing circumstances.
I want to live by my own abilities, instead of being pro-
vided for in this way. I am stuck in a cage with these in-
congruous companions, and called a member of the Happy
Family ; but suppose you took a Queen's Counsel out of
Westminster Hall, and settled him board and lodging free,
in Utopia, where there would be no excuse for 'his quiddits,
his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks,' how do you
think he 'd like it ? Not at all. Then why do you expect
me to like it, and add insult to injury by calling me a
'Happy' Raven!
This is what 7 say: I want to see men do it. I should
like to get up a Happy Family of men, and show 'em. I
134 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
should like to put the Rajah Brooke, the Peace Society,
Captain Aaron Smith, several Malay Pirates, Dr. Wiseman,
the Reverend Hugh Stowell, Mr. Fox of Oldham, the Board
of Health, all the London undertakers, some of the Com-
mon (very common / think) Council, and all the vested in-
terests in the filth and misery of the poor into a good-sized
cage, and see how they 'd get on. I should like to look in
at 'em through the bars, after they had undergone the- train-
ing I have undergone. You wouldn't find Sir Peter Laurie
'putting down' Sanitary Reform then, or getting up in that
vestry, and pledging his word and honour to the non-existence
of Saint Paul's Cathedral, I expect ! And very happy he 'd
be, wouldn't he, when he couldn't do that sort of thing?
I have no idea of you lords of the creation coming staring
at me in this false position. Why don't you look at home?
If you think I 'm fond of the dove, you 're very much mis-
taken. If you imagine there is the least goodwill between
me and the pigeon, you never were more deceived in your
lives. If you suppose I wouldn't demolish the whole Family
(myself excepted), and the cage too, if I had my own way,
you don't know what a real Raven is. But if you do know
this, why am 7 to be picked out as a curiosity? Why don't
you go and stare at the Bishop of Exeter? 'Ecod, he 's one
of our breed, if anybody is !
Do you make me lead this public life because I seem to be
what I ain't? Why, I don't make half the pretences that
are common among you men ! You never heard me call the
sparrow my noble friend. When did / ever tell the Guinea-
Pig that he was my Christian brother? Name the occasion
of my making myself a party to the 'sham' (my friend Mr.
Carlyle will lend me his favourite word for the occasion)
that the cat hadn't really her eye upon the mouse ! Can you
say as much? What about the last Court Ball, the next
Debate in the Lords, the last great Ecclesiastical Suit, the
next long assembly in the Court Circular? I wonder you
are not ashamed to look me in the eye ! I am an independent
Member — of the Happy Family ; and I ought to be let out.
I have only one consolation in my inability to damage
anything, and that is that I hope I am instrumental in prop-
PERFECT FELICITY 135
agating a delusion as to the character of Ravens. I have
a strong impression that the sparrows on our beat are be-
ginning to think they may trust a Raven. Let 'em try!
There 's an uncle of mine in a stable-yard down in York-
shire who will very soon undeceive any small bird that may
favour him with a call.
The dogs too. Ha, ha ! As they go by, they look at me
and this dog in quite a friendly way. They never suspect
how I should hold on to the tip of his tail, if I consulted my
own feelings instead of our proprietor's. It 's almost worth
being here, to think of some confiding dog who has seen me,
going too near a friend of mine who lives at a hackney-coach
stand in Oxford Street. You wouldn't stop his squeaking in
a hurry, if my friend got a chance at him.
It 's the same with the children. There 's a young gen-
tleman with a hat and feathers, resident in Portland Place,
who brings a penny to our proprietor twice a week. He
wears very short white drawers, and has mottled legs above his
socks. He hasn't the least idea what I should do to his legs,
if I consulted my own inclinations. He never imagines what
I am thinking of when we look at one another. May he only
take those legs, in their present juicy state, close to the cage
of my brother-in-law of the Zoological Gardens, Regent's
Park!
Call yourselves rational beings, and talk about our being
reclaimed? Why, there isn't one of us who wouldn't aston-
ish you, if we could only get out. Let me out, and see
whether / should be meek or not. But this is the way you
always go on in — you know you do. Up at Pentonville, the
sparrow says — and he ought to know, for he was born in a
stack of chimneys in that prison — you are spending I am
afraid to say how much, every year out of the rates, to keep
men in solitude, where they CAN'T do any harm (that you
know of), and then you sing all sorts of choruses about their
being good. So am I what you call good — here. Why?
Because I can't help it. Try me outside !
You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, the Magpie says ;
and I agree with him. If you are determined to pet only
those who take things and hide them, why don't you pet the
136 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Magpie and me? We are interesting enough for you, ain't
we? The Mouse says you are not half so particular about
the honest people. He is not a bad authority. He was
almost starved when he lived in a workhouse, wasn't he? He
didn't get much fatter, I suppose, when he moved to a
labourer's cottage? He was thin enough when he came from
that place, here — I know that. And what does the Mouse
(whose word is his bond) declare? He declares that you
don't take half the care you ought ; of your own young, and
don't teach 'em half enough. Why don't you then? You
might give our proprietor something to do, I should think,
in twisting miserable boys and girls into their proper nature,
instead of twisting us out of ours. You are a nice set of
fellows, certainly, to come and look at Happy Families, as if
you had nothing else to look after 1
I take the opportunity of our proprietor's pen and ink in
the evening to write this. I shall put it away in a corner —
quite sure, as it 's intended for the Post Office, of Mr. Rowland
Hill's getting hold of it somehow, and sending it to some-
body. I understand he can do anything with a letter.
Though the Owl says (but I don't believe him), that the
present prevalence of measles and chicken-pox among infants
in all parts of this country, has been caused by Mr. Rowland
Hill. I hope I needn't add that we Ravens are all good
scholars, but that we keep our secret (as the Indians be-
lieve the Monkeys do, according to a Parrot of my acquaint-
ance) lest our abilities should be imposed upon. As nothing
worse than my present degradation as a member of the Happy
Family can happen to me, however, I desert the General Free-
mason's Lodge of Ravens, and express my disgust in writing.
RAVEN IN THE HAPPY FAMILY 137
FROM THE RAVEN IN THE HAPPY
FAMILY
[MAY 11, 1850]
I WON'T bear it, and I don't see why I should.
Having begun to commit my grievances to writing, I have
made up my mind to go on. You men have a saying, 'I may
as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.' Very good, I may
as well get into a false position with our proprietor for a
ream of manuscript as a quire. Here goes !
I want to know who Buffon * was. I '11 take my oath he
wasn't a bird. Then what did he know about birds — espe-
cially about Ravens? He pretends to know all about Ravens.
Who told him? Was his authority a Raven? I should
think not. There never was a Raven yet who committed
himself, you '11 find, if you look into the precedents.
There 's a schoolmaster in dusty black knee-breeches and
stockings, who comes and stares at our establishment every
Saturday, and brings a lot of boys with him. He is always
bothering the boys about Buffon. That 's the way I know
what Buffon says. He is a nice man, Buffon ; and you 're
all nice men together, ain't you?
What do you mean by saying that I am inquisitive and
impudent, that I go everywhere, that I affront and drive off
the dogs, that I play pranks on the poultry, and that I am
particularly assiduous in cultivating the goodwill of the cook?
That 's what your friend Buffon says, and you adopt him
it appears. And what do you mean by calling me 'a glutton
by nature and a thief by habit'? Why, the identical boy
who was being told this, on the strength of Buffon, as he
looked through our wires last Saturday, was almost out of
his mind with pudding, and had got another boy's top in
his pocket !
I tell you what. I like the idea of you men, writing his-
tories of us, and settling what we are, and what we are not.
- iComte de G. L. L. Buffon, Naturalist, 1707-1788.
and calling us any names you like best. What colours do you
think you would show in, yourselves, if some of us were
to take it into our heads to write histories of you? I know
something of Astley's Theatre, I hope; I was about the
stables there a few years. Ecod ! if you heard the observa-
tions of the Horses after the performance, you 'd have some
of the conceit taken out of you !
I don't mean to say that I admire the Cat. I don't ad-
mire her. On the whole, I have a personal animosity towards
her. But being obliged to lead this life, I condescend to
hold communication with her, and I have asked her what her
opinion is. She lived with an old lady of property before
she came here, who had a number of nephews and nieces. She
says she could show you up to that extent, after her expe-
rience in that situation, that even you would be hardly
brazen enough to talk of cats being sly and selfish any
more.
I am particularly assiduous in cultivating the goodwill of
the cook, am I ? Oh ! I suppose you never do anything of
this sort, yourselves? No politician among you was ever
particularly assiduous in cultivating the goodwill of a min-
ister, eh? No clergyman in cultivating the goodwill of a
bishop, humph? No fortune-seeker in cultivating the goodwill
of a patron, hah? You have no toad-eating, no time-serv-
ing, no place-hunting, no lacqueyship of gold and silver sticks,
or anything of that sort, I suppose? You haven't too
many cooks, in short, whom you are all assiduously cultivat-
ing, till you spoil the general broth? Not you. You
leave that to the Ravens.
Your friend Buffon, and some more of you, are mighty
ready, it seems, to give us characters. Would you like to
hear about your own temper and forbearance? Ask the
Dog. About your never overloading or ill-using a willing
creature? Ask my brother-in-law's friend, the Camel, up
in the Zoological. About your gratitude to, and your
provision for, old servants? I wish I could refer you to
the last horse I dined off (he was very tough), up at a
knacker's yard in Battle Bridge. About your mildness,
RAVEX IN THE HAPPY FAMILY 139
and your abstinence from blows and cudgels? Wait till the
Donkey's book comes out !
You are very fond of laughing at the parrot, I observe.
Now, I don't care for the parrot. I don't admire the par-
rot's voice — it wants hoarseness. And I despise the parrot's
livery — considering black the only true wear. I would as
soon stick my bill into the parrot's breast as look at him.
Sooner. But if you come to that, and you laugh at the
parrot because the parrot says the same thing over and
over again, don't you think you could get up a laugh at
yourselves? Did you ever know a Cabinet Minister say of
a flagrant job or great abuse, perfectly notorious to the
whole country, that he had never heard a word of it himself,
but could assure the honourable gentleman that every in-
quiry should be made? Did you ever hear a Justice re-
mark, of any extreme example of ignorance, that it was a
most extraordinary case, and he couldn't have believed in the
possibility of such a case — when there had been, all through
his life, ten thousand such within sight of his chimney-pots?
Did you ever hear, among yourselves, anything approaching
to a parrot repetition of the words, Constitution, Coun-
try, Public Service, Self-Government, Centralisation, Un-
English, Capital, Balance of Power, Vested Interests, Corn,
Rights of Labour, Wages, or so forth? Did you ever?
No ! Of course you never !
But to come back to that fellow Buffon. He finds us
Ravens to be most extraordinary creatures. We have prop-
erties so remarkable, that you 'd hardly believe it. 'A piece
of money, a teaspoon, or a ring,' he says, 'are always tempt-
ing baits to our avarice. These we will slily seize upon ;
and, if not watched, carry to our favourite hole.' How
odd!
Did you ever hear of a place called California? 7 have.
I understand there are a number of animals over there, from
all parts of the world, turning up the ground with their
bills, grubbing under the water, sickening, moulting, living
in want and fear, starving, dying, tumbling over on their
backs, murdering one another, and all for what? Pieces of
140 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
money that they want to carry to their favourite holes.
Ravens every one of 'em ! Not a man among 'em, bless you !
Did you ever hear of Railway Scrip? / have. We made
a pretty exhibition of ourselves about that, we feathered
creatures ! Lord, how we went on about that Railway Scrip !
How we fell down, to a bird, from the Eagle to the Spar-
row, before a scarecrow, and worshipped it for the love of
the bits of rag and paper fluttering from its dirty pockets !
If it hadn't tumbled down in its rottenness, we should have
clapped a title on it within ten years, I '11 be sworn ! — Go
along with you, and your Buff on, and don't talk to me !
'The Raven don't confine himself to petty depredations
on the pantry or the larder' — here you are with your Buffon
again — 'but he soars at more magnificent plunder, that he
can neither exhibit nor enjoy.' This must be very strange
to you men — more than it is to the Cat who lived with that
old lady, though !
Now, I am not going to stand this. You shall not have
it all your own way. I am resolved that I won't have Ravens
written about by men, without having men written about by
Ravens — at all events by one Raven, and that 's me. I
shall put down my opinions about you. As leisure and op-
portunity serve, I shall collect a natural history of you.
You are a good deal given to talk about your missions.
That's my mission. How do you like it?
I am open to contributions from any animal except one
of your set ; bird, beast or fish, may assist me in my mission,
if he will. I have mentioned it to the Cat, intimated it to
the Mouse, and proposed it to the Dog. The Owl shakes
his head when I confide it to him, and says he doubts. He
always did shake his head and doubt. Whenever he brings
himself before the public, he never does anything except
shake his head and doubt. I should have thought he had
got himself into a sufficient mess by doing that, when he
roosted for a long time in the Court of Chancery. But he
can't leave off. He's always at it.
Talking of missions, here 's our Proprietor's Wife with a
mission now! She has found out that she ought to go and
vote at elections ; ought to be competent to sit in Parliament ;
RAVEN IN THE HAPPY FAMILY 141
ought to be able to enter the learned professions — the army
and navy, too, I believe. She has made the discovery that
she has no business to be the comfort of our Proprietor's
life, and to have the hold upon him of not being mixed up in
all the j anglings and wranglings of men, but is quite ill-
used in being the solace of his home, and wants to go out
speechifying. That 's our Proprietor's Wife's new mission.
Why, you never heard the Dove go on in that ridiculous
way. She knows her true strength better.
You are mighty proud about your language ; but it seems
to me that you don't deserve to have words, if you can't
make a better use of 'em. You know you are always fight-
ing about 'em. Do you never mean to leave that off,
and come to things a little? I thought you had high
authority for not tearing each other's eyes out, about words.
You respect it, don't you?
I declare I am stunned with words, on my perch in the
Happy Family. I used to think the cry of a Peacock bad
enough, when I was on sale in a menagerie, but I had rather
live in the midst of twenty peacocks, than one Gorham and
a Privy Council. In the midst of your wordy squabbling,
you don't think of the lookers-on. But if you heard what
/ hear in my public thoroughfare, you 'd stop a little of that
noise, and leave the great bulk of the people something to
believe in peace. You are overdoing it, I assure you.
I don't wonder at the Parrot picking words up and occu-
pying herself with them. She has nothing else to do.
There are no destitute parrots, no uneducated parrots, no
foreign parrots in a contagious state of distraction, no
parrots in danger of pestilence, no festering heaps of mis-
erable parrots, no parrots crying to be sent away beyond
the sea for dear life. But among you ! —
Well ! I repeat, I am not going to stand it. Tame sub-
mission to injustice is unworthy of a Raven. I croak the
croak of revolt, and call upon the Happy Family to rally
round me. You men have had it all your own way for a
long time. Now, you shall hear a sentiment or two about
yourselves.
I find my last communication gone from the corner where
142 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I hid it. I rather suspect the magpie, but he says, 'Upon
his honour.' If Mr. Rowland Hill has got it, he will do
me justice — more justice than you have done him lately, or
I am mistaken in my man.
II
[JUNE 8, 1850]
HALLOA !
You won't let me begin that Natural History of you,
eh? You will always be doing something or other, to take
off my attention? Now, you have begun to argue with
the Undertakers, have you? What next!
Ugh! you are a nice set of fellows to be discussing, at
this time of day, whether you shall countenance that hum-
bug any longer. 'Performing' funerals, indeed! I have
heard of performing dogs and cats, performing goats and
monkqys, performing ponies, white-mice, and canary-birds ;
but performing drunkards at so much a day, guzzling over
your dead, and throwing half of you into debt for a twelve-
month, beats all I ever heard of. Ha, ha !
The other day there was a person 'went and died' (as our
Proprietor's wife says) close to our establishment. Upon
my beak I thought I should have fallen off my perch, you
made me laugh so, at the funeral.
Oh my crop and feathers, what a scene it was ! / never
saw the Owl so charmed. It was just the thing for him.
First of all, two dressed-up fellows came — trying to look
sober, but they couldn't do it — and stuck themselves out-
side the door. There they stood, for hours, with a couple
of crutches covered over with drapery; cutting their jokes
on the company as they went in, and breathing such strong
rum and water into our establishment over the way, that the
Guinea-Pig (who has a poor little head) was drunk in ten
minutes. You are so proud of your humanity. Ha, ha!
As if a pair of respectable crows wouldn't have done it
much better?
RAVEN IN THE HAPPY FAMILY 143
By and by, there came a hearse and four, and then two
carriages and four; and on the tops of 'em, and on all the
horses' heads, were plumes of feathers, hired at so much
per plume; and everything, horses and all, was covered over
with black velvet, till you couldn't see it. Because there
were not feathers enough yet, there was a fellow in the pro-
cession carrying a board of 'em on his head, like Italian
images; and there were about five-and-twenty or thirty
other fellows (all hot and red in the face with eating and
drinking) dressed up in scarves and hat-bands, and carrying
— shut-up fishing-rods, I believe — who went draggling
through the mud, in a manner that I thought would be the
death of me ; while the 'Black Jobmaster' — that 's what he
calls himself — who had let the coaches and horses to a fur-
nishing undertaker, who had let 'em to a haberdasher, who
had let 'em to a carpenter, who had let 'em to the parish-
clerk, who had let 'em to the sexton, who had let 'em to the
plumber painter and glazier who had got the funeral to do,
looked out of the public-house window at the corner, with
his pipe in his mouth, and said — for I heard him — 'That was
the sort of turn-out to do a gen-teel party credit.' That !
As if any two-and-sixpenny masquerade, tumbled into a vat
of blacking, wouldn't be quite as solemn, and immeasurably
cheaper !
Do you think I don't know you? You 're mistaken if you
think so. But perhaps you do. Well! Shall I tell you
what I know? Can you bear it? Here it is then. The
Black Jobmaster is right. The root of all this, is the gen-
teel party.
You don't mean to deny it, I hope? You don't mean to
tell me that this nonsensical mockery isn't owing to your
gentility. Don't I know a Raven in a Cathedral Tower, who
has often heard your service for the Dead? Don't I know
that you always begin it with the words, 'We brought noth-
ing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry noth-
ing out'? Don't I know that in a monstrous satire on those
words, you carry your hired velvets, and feathers, and
scarves, and all the rest of it, to the edge of the grave, and
144 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
get plundered (and serve you right!) in every article, be-
cause you WILL be gen-teel parties to the last?
Eh? Think a little! Here's the plumber, painter and
glazier come to take the funeral order which he is going to
give to the sexton, who is going to give it to the clerk, who
is going to give it to the carpenter, who is going to give it
to the haberdasher, who is going to give it to the furnish-
ing undertaker, who is going to divide it with the Black
Jobmaster. 'Hearse and four, Sir?' says he. 'No, a pair
will be sufficient.' 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but when we
buried Mr. Grundy at number twenty, there was four on
'em, Sir; I think it right to mention it.' 'Well, perhaps
there had better be four.' 'Thank you, Sir. Two coaches
and four, Sir, shall we say?' 'No. Coaches and pair.'
'You '11 excuse my mentioning it, Sir, but pairs to the
coaches, and four to the hearse, would have a singular ap-
pearance to the neighbours. When we put four to any-
thing, we always carry four right through.' 'Well! say
four!' 'Thank you, Sir. Feathers of course?' 'No. No
feathers. They 're absurd.' 'Very good, Sir. No feath-
ers?' 'No.' lVery good, Sir. We can do fours without
feathers, Sir, but it 's what we never do. When we buried
Mr. Grundy, there was feathers, and — I only throw it out,
Sir — Mrs. Grundy might think it strange.' 'Very well !
Feathers !' 'Thank you, Sir,' — and so on,
/* it and so on, or not, through the whole black job of
jobs, because of Mrs. Grundy and the gen-teel party?
I suppose you 've thought about this ? I suppose you 've
reflected on what you're doing, and what you've done?
When you read about those poisonings for the burial society
money, you consider how it is that burial societies ever came
to be, at all? You perfectly understand— you who are not
the poor, and ought to set 'em an example — that, besides
making the whole thing costly, you 've confused their minds
about this burying, and have taught 'em to confound ex-
pense and show, with respect and affection. You know all
you've got to answer for, you gen-teel parties? I'm glad
of it.
I believe it's only the monkers who are servile imitators,
is it? You reflect! To be sure you do. So does Mrs.
Grundy — and she casts reflections — <lon't she?
What animals are those who scratch shallow holes in the
ground in crowded places, scarcely hide their dead in 'em,
and become unnaturally infected by their dead, and die by
thousands? Vultures, I suppose. I think you call the Vul-
ture an obscene bird? I don't consider him agreeable, but
I never caught him misconducting himself in that way.
My honourable friend, the dog — I call him my honourable
friend in your Parliamentary sense, because I hate him —
turns round three times before he goes to sleep. I ask him
why ? He says he don't know ; but he always does it. Do
you know how you ever came to have that board of feathers
carried on a fellow's head? Come. You 're a boastful race.
Show yourselves superior to the dog, and tell me !
Now, I don't love many people ; but I do love the under-
takers. I except them from the censure I pass upon you
in general. They know you so well, that I look upon 'em
as a sort of Ravens. They are so certain of your being
gen-teel parties, that they stick at nothing. They are sure
they 've got the upper hand of you. Our proprietor was
reading the paper, only last night, and there was an adver-
tisement in it from a sensitive and libelled undertaker, to
wit, that the allegation 'that funerals were unnecessarily ex-
pensive, was an insult to his professional brethren.' Ha !
ha ! Why, he knows he has you on the hip. It 's
nothing to him that their being unnecessarily expensive is
a fact within the experience of all of you as glaring as the
sun when there 's not a cloud. He is certain that when you
want a funeral 'performed,' he has only to be down upon
you with Mrs. Grundy, to do what he likes with you — and
then he '11 go home, and laugh like a Hyaena.
I declare (supposing I wasn't detained against my will
by our proprietor) that, if I had any arms, I 'd take the un-
dertakers to 'em ! There 's another, in the same paper, who
says they 're libelled, in the accusation of having disgrace-
fully disturbed the meeting in favour of what you call your
General Interment Bill. Our establishment was in the
Strand, that night. There was no crowd of undertakers'
146 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
men there, with circulars in their pockets, calling on 'em to
come in coloured clothes to make an uproar; it wasn't un-
dertakers' men who got in with forged orders to yell and
screech ; it wasn't undertakers' men who made a brutal charge
at the platform, and overturned the ladies like a troop of
horse. Of course not. / know all about it.
But — and lay this well to heart, you Lords of the crea-
tion, as you call yourselves ! — it is these undertakers' men to
whom, in the last trying, bitter grief of life, you confide the
loved and honoured forms of your sisters, mothers, daugh-
ters, wives. It is to these delicate gentry, and to their sol-
emn remarks, and decorous behaviour, that you entrust the
sacred ashes of all that has been the purest to you, and the
dearest to you, in this world. Don't improve the breed !
Don't change the custom! Be true to my opinion of you,
and to Mrs. Grundy !
I nail the black flag of the black Jobmaster to our cage —
figuratively speaking — and I stand up for the gen-teel
parties. So (but from different motives) does the Owl.
You 've got a chance, by means of that bill I 've mentioned —
by and by, I call my own a General Interment Bill, for it
buries everything it gets hold of — to alter the whole system ;
to avail yourselves of the results of all improved European
experience ; to separate death from life ; to surround it with
everything that is sacred and solemn, and to dissever it from
everything that is shocking and sordid. You won't read
the bill? You won't dream of helping it? You won't
think of looking at the evidence on which it 's founded — Will
you? No. That's right!
Gen-teel parties, step forward, if you please, to the rescue
of the black Jobmaster ! The rats are with you. I am .in-
formed that they have unanimously passed a resolution that
the closing of the London churchyards will be an insult to
their professional brethren, and will oblige 'em 'to fight for
it.' The Parrots are with you. The Owl is with you.
The Raven is with you. No General Interments. Carrion
for ever !
Ha, ha ! Halloa !
RAVEN IN THE HAPPY FAMILY 147
III
[AUGUST 24, 1850]
I SUPPOSE you thought I was dead? No such thing. Don't
flatter yourselves that I haven't got my eye upon you. I
am wide awake, and you give me plenty to look at.
I have begun my great work about you. I have been
collecting materials from the Horse, to begin with. You are
glad to hear it, ain't you? Very likely. Oh, he gives you
a nice character. He makes you out a charming set of
fellows.
He informs me, by the bye, that he is a distinct relation
of the pony that was taken up in a balloon a few weeks ago ;
and that the pony's account of your going to see him at
Vauxhall Gardens, is an amazing thing. The pony says,
that when he looked round on the assembled crowd, come to
see the realisation of the wood-cut in the bill, he found it
impossible to discover which was the real Mister Green —
there were so many Mister Greens — and they were all so very
green !
But that 's the way with you. You know it is. Don't
tell me ! You 'd go to see anything that other people went
to see. And don't flatter yourselves that I am referring to
'the vulgar curiosity,' as you choose to call it, when you
mean some curiosity in which you don't participate your-
selves. The polite curiosity in this country, is as vulgar as
any curiosity in the world.
Of course you '11 tell me, no it isn't, but I say yes it is.
What have you got to say for yourselves about the Nepau-
lese Princes, I should like to know? Why, there has been
more crowding, and pressing, and pushing, and jostling,
and struggling, and striving, in genteel houses this last
season on account of those Nepaulese Princes, than would
take place in vulgar Cremorne Gardens and Greenwich Park,
at Easter time and Whitsuntide! And what for? Do you
know anything about 'em? Have you any idea why they
came here? Can you put your finger on their country in
the map? Have you ever asked yourselves a dozen common
questions about its climate, natural history, government, pro-
ductions, customs, religion, manners? Not you! Here are
a couple of swarthy Princes very much out of their element,
walking about in wide muslin trousers, and sprinkled all over
with gems (like the clock-work figure on the old round plat-
form in the street, grown up), and they 're fashionable out-
landish monsters, and it 's a new excitement for you to get a
stare at 'em. As to asking 'em to dinner and seeing 'em sit
at table without eating in your company (unclean animals as
you are!), you fall into raptures at that. Quite delicious,
isn't it ? Ugh, you dunder-headed boobies !
I wonder what there is, new and strange, that you wouldn't
lionise, as you call it. Can you suggest anything? It 's not
a hippopotamus, I suppose. I hear from my brother-in-law
in the Zoological Gardens, that you are always pelting away
into the Regent's Park, by thousands, to see the hippo-
potamus. Oh, you 're very fond of hippopotami, ain't you ?
You study one attentively, when you do see one, don't you?
You come away, so much wiser than you went, reflecting so
profoundly on the wonders of creation — eh?
Bah ! You follow one another like wild • geese, but you
are not so good to eat !
These, however, are not the observations of my friend
the Horse. He takes you, in another point of view. Would
you like to read his contribution to my Natural History of
you? No? You shall then.
He is a Cab-horse now. He wasn't always, but he is now,
and his usual stand is close to our Proprietor's usual stand.
That 's the way we have come into communication, we
'dumb animals.' Ha, ha ! Dumb, too ! Oh, the con-
ceit of you men, because you can bother the community out
of their five wits, by making speeches !
Well. I mentioned to this Horse that I should be glad
to have his opinions and experiences of you. Here they are :
'At the request of my honourable friend the Raven, I proceed
to offer a few remarks in reference to the animal called Man.
I have had varied experience of this strange creature for fifteen
years, and am now driven by a man, in the hackney cabriolet,
number twelve thousand four hundred and fifty-two.
'The sense Man entertains of his own inferiority to the nobler
animals — and I am now more particularly referring to the Horse
— has impressed me forcibly, in the course of my career. If a
Man knows a Horse well, he is prouder of it than of any knowl-
edge of himself, within the range of his limited capacity. He
regards it as the sum of all human acquisition. If he is learned
in a Horse, he has nothing else to learn. And the same remark
applies, with some little abatement, to his acquaintance with
Dogs. I have seen a good deal of Man in my time, but I think
I have never met a Man who didn't feel it necessary to his repu-
tation to pretend, on occasion, that he knew something of Horses
and Dogs, though he really knew nothing. As to making us a
subject of conversation, my opinion is that we are more talked
about, than history, philosophy, literature, art, and science, all
put together. I have encountered innumerable gentlemen in the
country, who were totally incapable of interest in anything but
Horses and Dogs — except Cattle. And I have always been given
to understand that they were the flower of the civilised world.
'It is very doubtful, to me, whether there is, upon the whole,
anything Man is so ambitious to imitate, as an ostler, a jockey,
a stage coachman, a horse-dealer, or a dog-fancier. There may
be some other character which I do not immediately remember,
that fires him with emulation; but, if there be, I am sure it is
connected with Horses, or Dogs, or both. This is an unconscious
compliment, on the part of the tyrant, to the nobler animals, which
I consider to be very remarkable. I have known Lords, and
Baronets, and Members of Parliament, out of number, who have
deserted every other calling, to become but indifferent stablemen
or kennelmen, and be cheated on all hands by the real aristocracy
of those pursuits who were regularly born to the business.
'All this, I say, is a tribute to our superiority which I consider
to be very remarkable. Yet, still, I can't quite understand it.
Man can hardly devote himself to us, in admiration of our
virtues, because he never imitates them. We Horses are as
honest, though I say it, as animals can be. If, under the pres-
sure of circumstances, we submit to act at a Circus, for instance,
we always show that we are acting. We never deceive anybody.
We would scorn to do it. If we are called upon to do anything
in earnest, we do our best. If we are required to run a race
falsely, and to lose when we could win, we are not to be relied
upon, to commit a fraud; Man must come in at that point, and
150 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
force us to it. And the extraordinary circumstance to me, is,
that Man (whom I take to be a powerful species of Monkey)
is always making us nobler animals the instruments of his mean-
ness and cupidity. The very name of our kind has become a
byword for all sorts of trickery and cheating. We are as in-
nocent as counters at a game — and yet this creature WILL play
falsely with us!
'Man's opinion, good or bad, is not worth much, as any rational
Horse knows. But, justice is justice; and what I complain of,
is, that Mankind talks of us as if We had something to do with
all this. They say that such a man was "ruined by Horses."
Ruined by Horses! They can't be open, even in that, and say
he was ruined by Men; but they lay it at our stable-door! As
if we ever ruined anybody, or were ever doing anything but
being ruined ourselves, in our generous desire to fulfil the useful
purposes of our existence !
'In the same way, we get a bad name as if we were profligate
company. "So-and-so got among Horses, and it was all up with
him." Why, rve would have reclaimed him — we would have made
him temperate, industrious, punctual, steady, sensible, — what
harm would he ever have got from us, I should wish to ask?
'Upon the whole, speaking of him as I have found him, I
should describe Man as an unmeaning and conceited creature,
very seldom to be trusted, and not likely to make advances to-
wards the honesty of the nobler animals. I should say that his
power of warping the nobler animals to bad purposes, and
damaging their reputation by his companionship, is, next to the
art of growing oats, hay, carrots, and clover, one of his principal
attributes. He is very unintelligible in his caprices; seldom ex-
pressing with distinctness what he wants of us; and relying
greatly on our better judgment to find out. He is cruel, and
fond of blood — particularly at a steeple-chase — and is very un-
grateful.
'And yet, so far as I can understand, he worships us too. He
sets up images of us (not particularly like, but meant to be) in
the streets, and calls upon his fellows to admire them, and be-
lieve in them. As well as I can make out, it is not of the least
importance what images of Men are put astride upon these im-
ages of Horses, for I don't find any famous personage among
them — except one, and his image seems to have been contracted
for, by the gross. The jockeys who ride our statues are very
queer jockeys, it appears to me, but it is something to find Man
even posthumously sensible of what he owes to us. I believe
RAVEN IN THE HAPPY FAMILY 151
that when he has done any great wrong to any very distin-
guished Horse, deceased, he gets up a subscription to have an
awkward likeness of him made, and erects it in a public place,
to be generally venerated. I can find no other reason for the
statues of us that abound.
'It must be regarded as a part of the inconsistency of Man,
that he erects no statues to the Donkeys — who, though far in-
ferior animals to ourselves, have great claims upon him. I should
think a Donkey opposite the Horse at Hyde Park, another in
Trafalgar Square, and a group of Donkeys, in brass, outside the
Guildhall of the City of London (for I believe the Common
Council Chamber is inside that building) would be pleasant and
appropriate memorials.
'I am not aware that I can suggest anything more, to my
honourable friend the Raven, which will not already have oc-
curred to his fine intellect. Like myself, he is the victim of
brute force, and must bear it until the present state of things
is changed — as it possibly may be in the good time which I un-
derstand is coming, if I wait a little longer.'
There! How do you like that? That 's the Horse. You
shall have another animal's sentiments, soon. I have com-
municated with plenty of 'em, and they are all down upon
you. It 's not I alone who have found you out. You are
generally detected, I am happy to say, and shall be covered
with confusion.
Talking about the horse, are you going to set up any
more horses? Eh? Think a bit. Come! You haven't
got horses enough yet, surely? Couldn't you put somebody
else on horseback, and stick him up, at the cost of a few
thousands? You have already statues to most of the 'bene-
factors of mankind' (SEE ADVERTISEMENT) in your principal
cities. You walk through groves of great inventors, in-
structors, discoverers, assuagers of pain, preventers of dis-
ease, suggesters of purifying thoughts, doers of noble deeds.
Finish the list. Come!
Whom shall you hoist into the saddle? Let 's have a car-
dinal virtue! Shall it be Faith? Hope? Charity? Aye,
Charity 's the virtue to ride on horseback ! Let 's have
Charity !
How shall we represent it? Eh? What do you think?
152 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Royal? Certainly. Duke? Of course. Charity always
was typified in that way, from the time of a certain widow,
downwards. And there 's nothing less left to put up ; all the
commoners who were 'benefactors of mankind' having had
their statues in the public places, long ago.
How shall we dress it? Rags? Low. Drapery? Com-
monplace. Field-Marshal's uniform? The very thing!
Charity in a Field-Marshal's uniform (none the worse for
wear) with thirty thousand pounds a year, public money, in
its pocket, and fifteen thousand more, public money, up be-
hind, will be a piece of plain uncompromising truth in the
highways, and an honour to the country and the time.
Ha, ha, ha ! You can't leave the memory of an unassum-
ing, honest, good-natured, amiable old Duke alone, without
bespattering it with your flunkeyism, can't you ? That 's
right — and like you! Here are three brass buttons in my
crop. I '11 subscribe 'em all. One, to the statue of Charity ;
one, to a statue of Hope; one, to a statue of Faith. For
Faith, we '11 have the Nepaulese Ambassador on horseback —
being a prince. And for Hope, we '11 put the Hippopotamus
on horseback, and so make a group.
Let 's have a meeting about it !
THE 'GOOD' HIPPOPOTAMUS
[OCTOBEE 12, 1850]
OTTR correspondent, the Raven in the Happy Family, sug-
gested in these pages, not long ago, the propriety of a meet-
ing being held, to settle the preliminary arrangements for
erecting an equestrian statue to the Hippopotamus. We
are happy to have received some exclusive information on
this interesting subject, and to be authorised to lay it before
our readers.
It appears that Mr. Hamet Safi Cannana, the Arabian
gentleman who acts as Secretary to H. R. H. (His Rolling
Hulk) the Hippopotamus, has been, for some time, re-
flecting that he is under great obligations to that distin-
guished creature. Mr. Hamet Safi Cannana (who is remark-
THE 'GOOD' HIPPOPOTAMUS 153
able for candour) has not hesitated to say that, but for his
accidental public connection with H. R. H., he Mr. Cannana
would no doubt have remained to the end of his days an
obscure individual, perfectly unknown to fame, and pos-
sessing no sort of claim on the public attention. H. R. H.
having been the means of getting Mr. Cannana's name into
print on several occasions, and having afforded Mr. Cannana
various opportunities of plunging into the newspapers, Mr.
Cannana has felt himself under a debt of gratitude to
H. R. H., requiring some public acknowledgment and re-
turn. Mr. Cannana, after much consideration, has been
able to think of no return, at once so notorious and so cheap,
as a monument to H. R. H., to be erected at the public ex-
pense. We cannot positively state that Mr. Cannana
founded this idea on our Correspondent's suggestion — for,
indeed, we have reason to believe that he promulgated it be-
fore our Correspondent's essay appeared — but, we trust it
is not claiming too much for the authority of our Corre-
spondent to hope that it may have confirmed Mr. Cannana in
a very noble, a very sensible, a very spirited, undertaking.
We proceed to record its history, as far as it has yet gone.
Mr. Hamet Safi Cannana, having conceived the vast orig-
inal idea of erecting a Public Monument to H. R. H., set
himself to consider next, by what adjective H. R. H. could
be most attractively distinguished in the advertisements of
that Monument. After much painful and profound cogita-
tion, Mr. Cannana was suddenly inspired with the wonderful
thought of calling him the 'Good' Hippopotamus !
This is so obviously an inspiration, — a fancy reserved,
through all the previous ages of the world, for this extra-
ordinary genius, — that we have been at some pains to trace
it, if possible, to its source. But, as usually happens in such
cases, Mr. Cannana can give no account of the process by
which he arrived at the result. Mr. Cannana's description of
himself, rendered into English, would be, that he was 'both-
ered'; that he had thought of a number of adjectives, as, the
oily Hippopotamus, the bland Hippopotamus, the bathing
Hippopotamus, the expensive Hippopotamus, the valiant
Hippopotamus, the sleepy Hippopotamus, when, in a mo-
154 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ment, as it were in the space of a flash of lightning, he
found he had written down, without knowledge why or
wherefore, and without being at all able to account for it,
those endearing words, the 'Good Hippopotamus.'
Having got the phrase down, in black and white, for
speedy publication, the next step was to explain it to an
unimaginative public. This process Mr. Cannana can de-
;cribe. He relates, that when he came to consider the vast
quantities of milk of which the Hippopotamus partook, his
imazing consumption of meal, his unctuous appetite for
dates, his jog-trot manner of going, his majestic power of
jleep, he felt that all these qualities pointed him out emphat-
ically as the 'Good' Hippopotamus. He never howled, like the
Hyena ; he never roared, like the Lion ; he never screeched,
like the Parrot ; he never damaged the tops of high trees, like
the Giraffe; he never put a trunk in people's way, like the
Elephant ; he never hugged anybody, like the Bear ; he never
projected a forked tongue, like the Serpent. He was an
easy, basking, jolly, slow, inoffensive, eating and drinking
Hippopotamus. Therefore, he was, supremely, the 'Good'
Hippopotamus.
When Mr. Cannana observed the subject from a closer
point of view, he began to find that H. R. H. was not only the
'Good,' but a Benefactor to the whole human race. He
toiled not, neither did he spin, truly — but he bathed in cool
water when the weather was hot, he slept when he came out
of the bath ; and he bathed and slept, serenely, for the public
gratification. People, of all ages and conditions, rushed to
see him bathe, and sleep, and feed; and H. R. H. had no
objection. As H. R. H. lay luxuriously winking at the striv-
ing public, one warm summer day, Mr. Cannana distinctly
perceived that the whole of H. R. H.'s time and energy was
devoted to the service of that public. Mr. Cannana's eye,
wandering round the hall, and observing, there assembled, a
number of persons labouring under the terrible disorder of
having nothing particular to do, and too much time to do it
in, moistened, as he reflected that the whole of H. R. H.?s
life, in giving them some temporary excitement, was an act
of charity; was 'devoted' (Mr. Cannana has since printed
THE 'GOOD' HIPPOPOTAMUS 155
these words) 'to the protection and affectionate care of the
sick and the afflicted.' He perceived, upon the instant, that
H. R. H. was a Hippopotamus of 'unsurpassed worth,' and
he drew up an advertisement so describing him.
Mr. Cannana, having brought his project thus far on its
road to prosperity, without stumbling over any obstacle in the
way, now considered it expedient to impart the great design
to some other person or persons who would go hand in hand
with him. He concluded (having some knowledge of the
world) that those who had lifted themselves into any degree
of notoriety by means of H. R. H., would be the most likely
(but only as best knowing him) to possess a knowledge of
his unsurpassed worth. It is an instance of Mr. Cannana's
sagacity, that he communicated with the Milkman who sup-
plies the Zoological Gardens.
The Milkman immediately put down his name for ten
pounds, his wife's for five pounds, and each of their twin
children for two pounds ten. He added, in a spirited letter,
addressed to Mr. Cannana, and a copy of which is now before
us, 'You may rely on my assistance in any way, or in every
way, that may be useful to your patriotic project, of erect-
ing a Monument to the "Good" Hippopotamus. We have
not Monuments enough. We want more. H. R. H.'s con-
sumption of milk has far exceeded, from the first moment of
his unwearied devotion of himself to the happiness of Man-
kind, any animal's with which I am acquainted; and that
nature must be base indeed, that would not vibrate to your
appeal.' Emboldened by this sympathy, Mr. Cannana next
addressed himself to the Mealman, who replied, 'This is as it
should be,' and enclosed a subscription of seven pounds ten
— with a request that it might be stated in the published list
that the number of his house was ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-
FOUR B, at the right-hand corner of High Street, and Blue
Lion Street, and that it had no connection with any similar
establishments in the same neighbourhood, which were all
impositions.
Mr. Cannana now proceeded to form a Committee. The
Milkman and the Mealman both consented to serve. Also
the two Policemen usually on duty (under Mr. Cannana's
156 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
auspices), in H. R. H.'s den; the principal Money-taker at
the gardens; the Monkey who, early in the season, was ap-
pointed (by Mr. Cannana) to a post on H. R. H.'s grounds;
and all the artificers employed (under Mr. Cannana's direc-
tions), in constructing the existing accommodation for H.
R. H.'s entire dedication of his life and means to the consola-
tion of the afflicted. Still, Mr. Cannana deemed it necessary
to his project to unite in one solid phalanx all the leading
professional keepers of Show Animals in and near London;
and this extensive enterprise he immediately pursued, by
circular-letter signed Hamet San* Cannana, setting forth the
absolute and indispensable necessity of 'raising a permanent
monument in honor of the "Good" Hippopotamus, which,
while it becomes a record of gratitude for his self-sacrifices in
the cause of charity, shall serve as a guide and example to all
who wish to become the benefactors of mankind.'
The response to this letter, was of the most gratifying
nature. Mr. Wombwell's keepers joined the Committee; all
the keepers at the Surrey Zoological enrolled themselves with-
out loss of time ; the exhibitor of the dancing dogs came for-
ward with alacrity ; the proprietor of 'Punch's Opera, con-
taining the only singing dogs in Europe,' became a Com-
mittee-man ; and the hoarse gentleman who trains the birds to
draw carriages, and the white mice to climb the tight rope
and &o up ladders, gave in his adhesion, in a manner that
did equal honour to his head and heart. The Italian boys
were once thought of, but these Mr. Cannana rejected as
low; for all Mr. Cannana's proceedings are characterised by
a delicate gentility.
The Committee, having been thus constituted, and being
reinforced by the purveyors to the different animals (who
are observed to be very strong in the cause) held a meeting
of their body, at which Mr. Cannana explained his general
views. Mr. Cannana said, that he had proposed to the vari-
ous keepers of Show Animals then present, to form them-
selves into that union for the erection of a Monument to the
'Good' Hippopotamus, because, laying aside individual jeal-
ousies, it appeared to him that the cause of that animal of
'unsurpassed worth,' was, in fact, the common cause of all
THE 'GOOD' HIPPOPOTAMUS 157
Show Animals. There was one point of view (Mr. Cannana
said) in which the design they had met to advance appeared
to him to be exceedingly important. Some Show Animals
had not done well of Jate. Pathetic appeals had been made
to the public on their behalf; but the Public had 'appeared a
little to mistrust the Animals — why, he could not imagine — <
and their funds did not bear that proportion to their expend!^
ture which was to be desired. Now, here were they, the
Representatives of those Show Animals, about, one and all,
to address the Public on the subject of the 'Good' Hippo-
potamus. If they took the solid ground they ought to take ;
if they united in telling the Public without any misgiving that
he was a creature 'of unsurpassed worth,5 that 'his whole life
was devoted to the protection and affectionate care of the
sick and the afflicted'; that 'his self-sacrifices demanded the
public admiration and gratitude' ; and that he was 'a guide
and example to all who wished to become the benefactors of
Mankind' ; — if they did this, what he, Mr. Cannana, said, was,
that the Public would judge of their representations of their
Show Animals generally, by the self-evident nature of these
statements ; and their Show Animals, whatever they had been
in the past, could not fail to be handsomely supported by the
Public in future, and to win their utmost confidence.
This position was universally applauded, but it was reduced
to still plainer terms, by the straight-forward gentleman with
the hoarse voice who trains the birds and mice.
'In short,' said that gentleman, addressing Mr. Cannana,
'if we puts out this here 'Tizement, the Public will know in a
minute that there isn't a morsel of Humbug about us?'
Mr. Cannana replied, with earnestness, 'Exactly so ! My
honourable friend has stated precisely what I mean !'
This distinct statement of the case was much applauded,
and gave the greatest satisfaction to the assembled company.
It was then suggested by the Secretary, to Mr. Tyler's
tiger, that several thousand circulars, embodying these state-
ments (with a promise that the collector should shortly call
for a subscription) ought to be immediately signed by Mr.
Hamet Safi Cannana, addressed, and posted. This work
Mr. Cannana undertook to superintend, and we understand
158 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
that some ten thousand of these letters have since been de-
livered. The gentleman in waiting on Mr. Wombwell's
Sloth (who is of an ardent temperament) was of opinion
that the company should instantly vote subscriptions towards
the Monuntent from the funds of their respective establish-
ments: considering the fact, that the funds did not belong
to them, of secondary importance to the erection of a Monu-
ment to the 'Good' Hippopotamus. But, it was resolved to
defer this point until the public feeling on the undertaking
should have an opportunity of expressing itself.
This, as far as it has yet reached, is the history of the
Monument to the 'Good' Hippopotamus. The collector has
called, we understand, at a great many houses, but has not
yet succeeded in getting into several, in consequence of the
entrance being previously occupied by the collector of the
Queen's Taxes, going his rounds for the annuity to the
young Duke of Cambridge. Whom Heaven preserve!
SOME ACCOUNT OF
AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER
[APRIL 20, 1850]
•
No longer ago than this Easter time last past, we became
acquainted with the subject of the present notice. Our
knowledge of him is not by any means an intimate one, and
is only of a public nature. We have never interchanged any
conversation with him, except on one occasion when he asked
us to have the goodness to take off our hat, to which we
replied 'Certainly.'
Mr. Booley was born (we believe) in Rood Lane, in the
City of London. He is now a gentleman advanced in life,
and has for some years resided in the neighbourhood of
Islington. His father was a wholesale grocer (perhaps)
and he was (possibly) in the same way of business; or he
may, at an early age, have become a clerk in the Bank of
England or in a private bank, or in the India House. It
will be observed that we make no pretence of having any
AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER 159
information in reference to the private history of this
remarkable man, and that our account of it must be received
as rather speculative than authentic.
In person Mr. Booley is below the middle size, and corpu-
lent. His countenance is florid, he is perfectly bald, and
soon hot ; and there is a composure in his gait and manner,
calculated to impress a stranger with the idea of his being,
on the whole, an unwieldy man. It is only in his eye that
the adventurous character of Mr. Booley is seen to shine.
It is a moist, bright eye, of a cheerful expression, and in-
dicative of keen and eager curiosity.
It was not until late in life that Mr. Booley conceived the
idea of entering on the extraordinary amount of travel he
has since accomplished. He had attained the age of sixty-
five before he left England for the first time. In all the
immense journeys he has since performed, he has never laid
aside the English dress, nor departed in the slightest degree
from English customs. Neither does he speak a word of any
language but his own.
Mr. Booley's powers of endurance are wonderful. All
climates are alike to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alter-
nations of heat and cold appear to have the least effect upon
his hardy frame. His capacity of travelling, day and night,
for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any
traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help
of books. An intelligent Englishman may have occasionally
pointed out to him objects and scenes of interest; but other-
wise he has travelled alone and unattended. Though re-
markable for personal cleanliness, he has carried no lug-
gage; and his diet has been of the simplest kind. He has
often found a biscuit, or a bun, sufficient for his support
over a vast tract of country. Frequently, he has travelled
hundreds of miles, fasting, without the least abatement of
his natural spirits. It says much for the Total Abstinence
cause, that Mr. Booley has never had recourse to the artificial
stimulus of alcohol, to sustain him under his fatigues.
His first departure from the sedentary and monotonous
life he had hitherto led, strikingly exemplifies, we think, the
energetic character, long suppressed by that unchanging
160 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
routine. Without any communication with any member of
his family — Mr. Booley has never been married, but has many
relations — without announcing his intention to his solicitor,
or banker, or any person entrusted with the manage-
ment of his affairs, he closed the door of his house behind
him at one o'clock in the afternoon of a certain day, and
immediately proceeded to New Orleans, in the United States
of America.
His intention was to ascend the Mississippi and Missouri
rivers, to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Taking his
passage in a steamboat without loss of time, he was soon
upon the bosom of the Father of Waters, as the Indians call
the mighty stream which, night and day, is always carrying
huge instalments of the vast continent of the New World
down into the sea.
Mr. Booley found it singularly interesting to observe the
various stages of civilisation obtaining on the banks of
these mighty rivers. Leaving the luxury and brightness of
New Orleans — a somewhat feverish luxury and brightness,
he observed, as if the swampy soil were too much enriched in
the hot sun with the bodies of dead slaves — and passing
various towns in every stage of progress, it was very curi-
ous to observe the changes of civilisation and of vegetation
too. Here, while the doomed negro race were working in
the plantations, while the republican overseer looked on,
whip in hand, tropical trees were growing, beautiful flowers
in bloom; the alligator, with his horribly sly face, and his
jaws like two great saws, was basking on the mud; and the
strange moss of the country was hanging in wreaths and
garlands on the trees, like votive offerings. A little farther
towards the west, and the trees and flowers were changed, the
moss was gone, younger infant towns were rising, forests
were slowly disappearing, and the trees, obliged to aid in
the destruction of their kind, fed the heavily-breathing
monster that came clanking up those solitudes laden with the
pioneers of the advancing human army. The river itself,
that moving highway, showed him every kind of floating con-
trivance, from the lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the raft
of logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward to the poor
AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER 161
Indian's frail canoe. A winding thread through the enor-
mous range of country, unrolling itself before the wanderer
like the magic skein in the story, he saw it tracked by wan-
derers of every kind, roaming from the more settled world,
to those first nests of men. The floating theatre, dwelling-
house, hotel, museum, shop ; the floating mechanism for
screwing the trunks of mighty trees out of the mud, like
antediluvian teeth; the rapidly-flowing river, and the blaz-
ing woods ; he left them all behind — town, city, and log-
cabin, too; and floated up into the prairies and savannahs,
among the deserted lodges of tribes of savages, and among
their dead, lying alone on little wooden stages with their stark
faces upward towards the sky. Among the blazing grass,
and herds of buffaloes and wild horses, and among the wig-
wams of the fast-declining Indians, he began to consider
how, in the eternal current of progress setting across this
globe in one unchangeable direction, like the unseen agency
that points the needle to the Pole, the Chiefs who only dance
the dances of their fathers, and will never have a new figure
for a new tune, and the Medicine men who know no Medicine
but what was Medicine a hundred years ago, must be surely
and inevitably swept from the earth, whether they be Chocta-
was, Mandans, Britons, Austrians, or Chinese.
He was struck, too, by the reflection that savage nature
was not by any means such a fine and noble spectacle as some
delight to represent it. He found it a poor, greasy, paint-
plastered, miserable thing enough; but a very little way
above the beasts in most respects ; in many customs a long
way below them. It occurred to him that the 'Big Bird,'
or the 'Blue Fish,' or any of the other Braves, was but a
troublesome braggart after all; making a mighty whooping
and halloaing about nothing particular, doing very little for
science, not much more than the monkeys for art, scarcely
anything worth mentioning for letters, and not often mak-
ing the world greatly better than he found it. Civilisation,
Mr. Booley concluded, was, on the whole, with all its blem-
ishes, a more imposing sight, and a far better thing to stand
by-
Mr. Booley's observations of the celestial bodies, on this
162 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
voyage, were principally confined to the discovery of the
alarming fact, that light had altogether departed from the
moon; which presented the appearance of a white dinner-
plate. The clouds, too, conducted themselves in an extraor-
dinary manner, and assumed the most eccentric forms,
while the sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On his
return to his native country, however, he had the satisfaction
of finding all these things as usual.
It might have been expected that at his advanced age,
retired from the active duties of life, blessed with a com-
petency, and happy in the affections of his numerous rela-
tions, Mr. Booley would now have settled himself down, to
muse, for the remainder of his days, over the new stock of
experience thus acquired. But travel had whetted, not sat-
isfied, his appetite; and remembering that he had not seen
the Ohio River, except at the point of its junction with the
Mississippi, he returned to the United States, after a short
interval of repose, and appearing suddenly at Cincinnati,
the queen City of the West, traversed the clear waters of
the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition he had the pleasure
of encountering a party of intelligent workmen from
Birmingham who were making the same tour. Also his neph-
ew Septimus, aged only thirteen. This intrepid boy had
started from Peckham, in the old country, with two and
sixpence sterling in his pocket; and had, when he encoun-
tered his uncle at a point of the Ohio River, called Snaggy
Bar, still one shilling of that sum remaining !
Again at home, Mr. Booley was so pressed by his appetite
for knowledge as to remain at home only one day. At the
expiration of that short period, he actually started for New
Zealand.
It is almost incredible that a man in Mr. Booley's station
of life, however adventurous his nature, and however few his
artificial wants, should cast himself on a voyage of thirteen
thousand miles from Great Britain with no other outfit than
his watch and purse, and no arms but his walking-stick. We
are, however, assured on the best authority, that thus he
made the passage out, and thus appeared, in the act of
wiping his smoking head with his pocket-handkerchief, at the
AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER 163
entrance to Port Nicholson in Cook's Straits: with the very
spot within his range of vision, where his illustrious pred-
ecessor, Captain Cook, so unhappily slain at Otaheite, once
anchored.
After contemplating the swarms of cattle maintained on
the hills in this neighbourhood, and always to be found by
the stockmen when they are wanted, though nobody takes
any care of them — which Mr. Booley considered the more
remarkable, as their natural objection to be killed might be
supposed to be augmented by the beauty of the climate — Mr.
Booley proceeded to the town of Wellington. Having
minutely examined it in every point, and made himself per-
fect master of the whole natural history and process of
manufacture of the flax-plant, with its splendid yellow blos-
soms, he repaired to a Native Pa, which, unlike the Native
Pa to which he was accustomed, he found to be a town, and
not a parent. Here he observed a chief with a long spear,
making every demonstration of spitting a visitor, but really
giving him the Maori or welcome — a word Mr. Booley is
inclined to derive from the known hospitality of our Eng-
lish Mayors — and here also he observed some Europeans rub-
bing noses, by way of shaking hands, with the aboriginal
inhabitants. After participating in an affray between the
natives and the English soldiers in which the former were
defeated with great loss, he plunged into the Bush, and there
camped out for some months, until he had made a survey of
the whole country.
While leading this wild life, encamped by night near a
stream for the convenience of water in a Ware, or hut, built
open in the front, with a roof sloping backward to the
ground, and made of poles, covered and enclosed with bark
or fern, it was Mr. Booley's singular fortune to encounter
Miss Creeble, of The Misses Creeble's Boarding and Day
Establishment for Young Ladies, Kennington Oval, who,
accompanied by three of her young ladies in search of in-
formation, had achieved this marvellous journey, and was
then also in the Bush. Miss Creeble having very unsettled
opinions on the subject of gunpowder, was afraid that it
entered into the composition of the fire before the tent, and
that something would presently blow up or go off. Mr.
Booley, as a more experienced traveller, assuring her that
there was no danger; and calming the fears of the young
ladies, an acquaintance commenced between them. They
accomplished the rest of their travels in New Zealand to-
gether, and the best understanding prevailed among the little
party. They took notice of the trees, as the Kaikatea, the
Kauri, the Ruta, the Pukatea, the Hinau, and the Tanakaka
— names which Miss Creeble had a bland relish in pro-
nouncing. They admired the beautiful, aborescent, palm-
like fern, abounding everywhere, and frequently exceeding
thirty feet in height. They wondered at the curious owl,
who is supposed to demand 'More Pork !' wherever he flies,
and whom Miss Creeble termed 'an admonition of Nature
against greediness !' And they contemplated some very
rampant natives of cannibal propensities. After many pleas-
ing and instructive vicissitudes, they returned to England
in company, where the ladies were safely put into a hackney
cabriolet by Mr. Booley, in Leicester Square, London.
And now, indeed, it might have been imagined that that
roving spirit, tired of rambling about the world, would have
settled down at home in peace and honour. Not so. After
repairing to the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, and
accompanying Her Majesty on her visit to Ireland (which
he characterised as 'a magnificent Exhibition'), Mr. Booley,
with his usual absence of preparation, departed for Australia.
Here again, he lived out in the Bush, passing his time
chiefly among the working-gangs of convicts who were
carrying timber. He was much impressed by the ferocious
mastiffs chained to barrels, who assist the sentries in keep-
ing guard over those misdoers. But he observed that the
atmosphere in this part of the world, unlike the descriptions
he had read of it, was extremely thick, and that objects were
misty, and difficult to be discerned. From a certain unsteadi-
ness and trembling, too, which he frequently remarked on
the face of Nature, he was led to conclude that this part of
the globe was subject to convulsive heavings and earthquakes.
This caused him to return with some precipitation.
Again at home, and probably reflecting that the countries
AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER 165
he had hitherto visited were new in the history of man, this
extraordinary traveller resolved to proceed up the Nile to
the second cataract. At the next performance of the great
ceremony of 'opening the Nile,' at Cairo, Mr. Booley was
present.
Along that wonderful river, associated with such stupen-
dous fables, and with a history more prodigious than any
fancy of man, in its vast and gorgeous facts ; among tem-
ples, palaces, pyramids, colossal statues, crocodiles, tombs,
obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin ; he proceeded, like an
opium-eater in a mighty dream. Thebes rose before him.
An avenue of two hundred sphinxes, with not a head among
them, — one of six or eight, or ten such avenues, all leading
to a common centre — conducted to the Temple of Carnak:
its walls, eighty feet high and twenty-five feet thick, a mile
and three-quarters in circumference; the interior of its tre-
mendous hall, occupying an area of forty-seven thousand
square feet, large enough to hold four great Christian
churches, and yet not more than one-seventh part of the
entire ruin. Obelisks he saw, thousands of years of age, as
sharp as if the chisel had cut their edges yesterday ; colossal
statues fifty-two feet high, with 'little' fingers five feet and
a half long; a very world of ruins, that were marvellous old
ruins in the days of Herodotus; tombs cut high up in the
rock, where European travellers live solitary, as in stony
crows* nests, burning mummied Thebans, gentle and simple
— of the dried blood-royal maybe — for their daily fuel, and
making articles of furniture of their dusty coffins. Upon
the walls of temples, in colours fresh and bright as those of
yesterday, he read the conquests of great Egyptian mon-
archs ; upon the tombs of humbler people in the same bloom-
ing symbols, he saw their ancient way of working at their
trades, of riding, driving, feasting, playing games ; of mar-
rying and burying, and performing on instruments, and
singing songs, and healing by the power of animal mag-
netism, and performing all the occupations of life. He
visited the quarries of Silsileh, whence nearly all the red
stone used by the ancient Egyptian architects and sculptors
came; and there beheld enormous single-stoned colossal fig-
166 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ures, nearly finished — redly snowed up, as it were, and trying
hard to break out — waiting for the finishing touches, never to
be given by the mummied hands of thousands of years ago.
In front of the temple of Abou Simbel, he saw gigantic
figures sixty feet in height and twenty-one across the shoul-
ders, dwarfing live men on camels down to pigmies. Else-
where he beheld complacent monsters tumbled down like ill-
used Dolls of a Titanic make, and staring with stupid
benignity at the arid earth whereon their huge faces rested.
His last look of that amazing land was at the Great Sphinx,
buried in the sand — sand in its eyes, sand in its ears, sand
drifted on its broken nose, sand lodging, feet deep, in the
ledges of its head — struggling out of a wide sea of sand, as
if to look hopelessly forth for the ancient glories once sur-
rounding it.
In this expedition, Mr. Booley acquired some curious in-
formation in reference to the language of hieroglyphics.
He encountered the Simoon in the Desert, and lay down,
with the rest of his caravan until it had passed over. He also
beheld on the horizon some of those stalking pillars of sand,
apparently reaching from earth to heaven, which, with the
red sun shining through them, so terrified the Arabs attend-
ant on Bruce, that they fell prostrate, crying that the Day
of Judgment was come. More Copts, Turks, Arabs, Fel-
lahs, Bedouins, Mosques, Mamelukes, and Moosulmen he
saw, than we have space to tell. His days were all Arabian
Nights, and he saw wonders without end.
This might have satiated any ordinary man, for a time at
least. But Mr. Booley, being no ordinary man, within
twenty-four hours of his arrival at home was making the
overland journey to India.
He has emphatically described this, as *a beautiful piece
of scenery,' and 'a perfect picture.' The appearance of
Malta and Gibraltar he can never sufficiently commend. In
crossing the desert from Grand Cairo to Suez he was par-
ticularly struck by the undulations of the Sttndscape (he
preferred that word to Landscape, as more expressive of the
region), and by the incident of beholding a caravan upon
its line of march; a spectacle which in the remembrance
AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER 167
always affords him the utmost pleasure. Of the stations
on the desert, and the cinnamon gardens of Ceylon, he like-
wise entertains a lively recollection. Calcutta he praises
also ; though he has been heard to observe that the British
military at that seat of Government were not as well pro-
portioned as he could desire the soldiers of his country to
be; and that the breed of horses there in use was susceptible
of some improvement.
Once more in his native land, with the vigour of his con-
stitution unimpaired by the many toils and fatigues he had
encountered, what had Mr. Booley now to do, but, full of
years and honour, to recline upon the grateful appreciation
of his Queen and country, always eager to distinguish peace-
ful merit? What had he now to do, but to receive the
decoration ever ready to be bestowed, in England, on men
deservedly distinguished, and to take his place among the
best? He had this to do. He had yet to achieve the most
astonishing enterprise for which he was reserved. In all the
countries he had yet visited, he had seen no frost and snow.
He resolved to make a voyage to the ice-bound arctic regions.
In pursuance of this surprising determination, Mr. Booley
accompanied the expedition under Sir James Ross, con-
sisting of Her Majesty's ships the Enterprise and Investi-
gator, which sailed from the River Thames on the 12th of
May 1848, and which, on the llth of September, entered
Port Leopold Harbour.
In this inhospitable region, surrounded by eternal ice,
cheered by no glimpse of the sun, shrouded in gloom and
darkness, Mr. Booley passed the entire winter. The ships
were covered in, and fortified all round with walls of ice
and snow ; the masts were frozen up ; hoar frost settled on the
yards, tops, shrouds, stays, and rigging; around, in every
direction, lay an interminable waste, on which only the
bright stars, the yellow moon, and the vivid Aurora Borealis
looked, by night or day.
And yet the desolate sublimity of this astounding spec-
tacle was broken in a pleasant and surprising manner. In
the remote solitude to which he had penetrated, Mr. Booley
(who saw no Esquimaux during his stay, though he looked
168 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
for them in every direction) had the happiness of encounter-
ing two Scotch gardeners; several English compositors, ac-
companied by their wives; three brass-founders from the
neighbourhood of Long Acre, London ; two coach painters,
a gold-beater and his only daughter, by trade a staymaker;
and several other working-people from sundry parts of
Great Britain who had conceived the extraordinary idea of
'holiday-making5 in the frozen wilderness. Hither, too, had
Miss Creeble and her three young ladies penetrated: the
latter attired in braided peacoats of a comparatively light
material ; and Miss Creeble defended from the inclemency of
a Polar Winter by no other outer garment than a wadded
Polka-jacket. He found this courageous lady in the act of
explaining, to the youthful sharers of her toils, the various
phases of nature by which they were surrounded. Her ex-
planations were principally wrong, but her intentions always
admirable.
Cheered by the society of these fellow-adventurers, Mr.
Booley slowly glided on into the summer season. And now,
at midnight, all was bright and shining. Mountains of ice,
wedged and broken into the strangest forms — jagged points,
spires, pinnacles, pyramids, turrets, columns in endless suc-
cession and in infinite variety, flashing and sparkling with
ten thousand hues, as though the treasures of the earth were
frozen up in all that water — appeared on every side. Masses
of ice, floating and driving hither and thither, menaced the
hardy voyagers with destruction; and threatened to crush
their strong ships, like nutshells. But, below those ships
was clear sea-water, now; the fortifying walls were gone;
the yards, tops, shrouds and rigging, free from that hoary
rust of long inaction, showed like themselves again ; and the
sails, bursting from the masts, like foliage which the wel-
come sun at length developed, spread themselves to the wind,
and wafted the travellers away.
In the short interval that has elapsed since his safe return
to the land of his birth, Mr. Booley has decided on no new
expedition; but he feels that he will yet be called upon to
undertake one, perhaps of greater magnitude than any he
has achieved, and frequently remarks, in his own easy
way, that he wonders where the deuce he will be taken to
next ! Possessed of good health and good spirits, with pow-
ers unimpaired by all he has gone through, and with an
increase of appetite still growing with what it feeds on, what
may not be expected yet from this extraordinary man !
It was only at the close of Easter week that, sitting in an
armchair, at a private club called the Social Oysters, assem-
bling at Highbury Barn, where he is much respected, this
indefatigable traveller expressed himself in the following
terms :
'It is very gratifying to me,' said he, 'to have seen so
much at my time of life, and to have acquired a knowledge
of the countries I have visited, which I could not have de-
rived from books alone. When I was a boy, such travelling
would have been impossible, as the gigantic-moving-pano-
rama or diorama mode of conveyance, which I have principally
adopted (all my modes of conveyance have been pictorial),
had then not been attempted. It is a delightful charac-
teristic of these times, that new and cheap means are con-
tinually being devised for conveying the results of actual
experience to those who are unable to obtain such experi-
ences for themselves ; and to bring them within the reach of
the people — emphatically of the people ; for it is they at large
who are addressed in these endeavours, and not exclusive
audiences. Hence,' said Mr. Booley, 'even if I see a run on
an idea, like the panorama one, it awakens no ill-humour
within me, but gives me pleasant thoughts. Some of the
best results of actual travel are suggested by such means to
those whose lot it is to stay at home. New worlds open out
to them, beyond their little worlds, and widen their range of
reflection, information, sympathy, and interest. The more
man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood
among us all. I shall, therefore,' said Mr. Booley, 'now
propose to the Social Oysters, the healths of Mr. Banvard,
Mr. Brees, Mr. Phillips, Mr, Allen, Mr. Prout, Messrs,
Bonomi, Fahey, and Warren, Mr. Thomas Grieve, and Mr.
Burford. Long life to them all, and more power to their
pencils!'
The Social Oysters having drunk this toast with acclama-
170 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
tion, Mr. Booley proceeded to entertain them with anec-
dotes of his travels. This he is in the habit of doing after
they have feasted together, according to the manner of
Sinbad the Sailor— except that he does not bestow upon the
Social Oysters the munificent reward of one hundred sequins
per night, for listening.
A CARD FROM MR. BOOLEY
[MAY 18, 1850]
MR. BOOLEY (the great traveller) presents his compliments
to the conductor of Household Words, and begs to call his
attention to an omission in the account given in that delight-
ful journal, of Mr. Booley's remarks, in addressing the
Social Oysters.
Mr. Booley, in proposing the health of Mr. Thomas
Grieve, in connection with the beautiful diorama of the route
of the Overland Mail to India, expressly added (amid much
cheering from the Oysters) the names of Mr. Telbin his dis-
tinguished coadjutor; Mr. Absolon, who painted the fig-
ures ; and Mr. Herring, who painted the animals. Although
Mr. Booley's tribute of praise can be of little importance to
those gentlemen, he is uneasy in finding them left out of
the delightful Journal referred to.
Mr. Booley has taken the liberty of endeavouring to give
this communication an air of novelty, by omitting the words
*Now, Sir,' which are generally supposed to be essential to
all letters written to Editors for publication. It may be
interesting to add, in fact, that the Social Oysters consid-
ered it impossible that Mr. Booley could, by any means,
throw off the present communication, without availing him-
self of that established form of address.
HIOHBUIY BABN, Monday Evening.
MR. BOOLEY'S VIEW 171
MR. BOOLEY'S VIEW OF THE LAST
LORD MAYOR'S SHOW
MR. BOOLEY having been much excited by the accounts in
the newspapers, informing the public that the eminent Mr.
Batty, of Astley's Amphitheatre, Westminster Bridge Road,
Lambeth, would invent, arrange, and marshal the Procession
on Lord Mayor's Day, took occasion to announce to the
Social Oysters that he intended to be present at that great
national spectacle. Mr. Booley remarked that into whatever
regions he extended his travels, and however wide the range
of his experience became, he still found, on repairing to
Astley's Amphitheatre, that he had much to learn. For, he
always observed within those walls, some extraordinary cos-
tume or curious weapon, or some apparently unaccountable
manners and customs, which he had previously associated
with no nation upon earth. Thus, Mr. Booley said, he had
acquired a knowledge of Tartar Tribes, and also of Wild
Indians, and Chinese, which had greatly enlightened him as
to the habits of those singular races of men, in whom he
observed, as peculiarities common to the whole, that they
were always hoarse; that they took equestrian exercise in a
most irrational manner, riding up staircases and precipices
without the least necessity; that it was impossible for them
to dance, on any joyful occasion, without keeping time with
their forefingers, erect in the neighbourhood of their ears ;
and that whenever their castles were on fire (a calamity to
which they were particularly subject) numbers of them
immediately tumbled down dead, without receiving any
wound or blow, while others, previously distinguished in
war, fell an easy prey to the comic coward of the opposite
faction, who was usually armed with a strange instrument
resembling an enormous, supple cigar.
For such reasons alone, Mr. Booley took a lively interest
in the preliminary announcements of the last Lord Mayor's
Show ; but, when he understood, besides, that the Show was
to be an Allegory, devised by the ingenious Mr. Batty, in
conjunction with the Lord Mayor, as a kind of practical
172 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
riddle for all beholders to make guesses at, he hired a win-
dow in the most eligible part of the line of march, resolved
to devote himself to the discovery of its meaning.
The result of Mr. Booley's meditation on the Allegory
which passed before his eyes on the ninth of the present
month, was given to the Social Oysters, in the form of a
report, emanating directly and personally from himself, their
President. We have been favoured with a copy of the
document and also with permission to make it public; a
permission of which we now proceed to avail ourselves.
Those who have any acquaintance with Mr. Booley, will be
prepared to learn that the real intent and meaning of the Alle-
gory has been entirely missed, except by his sagacious and
original mind. We need scarcely observe that its obvious-
ness and simplicity must not be allowed to detract from the
merit either of Mr. Booley or of Mr. Batty, or of the Lord
Mayor. It is in the essence of these things that they should
be obvious and simple, when the clue is once found.
*At an early hour of the morning,' says Mr. Booley, — 'for
I observe, in the newspapers, that when any public spectacle
takes place, it always begins to take place at an early hour
of the morning, — I stationed myself at the window which had
been engaged for me. I will not attempt to describe my
feelings on looking down Cheapside. I am conscious of
having thought of Whittington and his cat, and of Ho-
garth's idle and industrious apprentice — also of the weather,
which was extremely fine.
'When the Procession began, with the Tallow Chandlers'
Company, succeeded by the Under Beadle of the Worshipful
Company of Tallow Chandlers, walking alone, as a Being
so removed and awful should, tears of solemn pleasure rose
to my eyes; but, I am not aware that I then suspected any
latent meaning in particular. Even when the "Beadle of the
Tallow Chandlers' Company in his gown," caused the vast
assemblage to hold its breath, and sent a thrill through all
the multitude, I believe I only regarded him as the eminent
Beadle in question, and not as a symbol. The appearance of
"The Captain and Lieutenant of the Band of Pensioners,"
and also of a Band of Pensioners, each carrying a Javelin
MK. BOOLEY'S VIEW 173
and Shield, struck me (though the band was by no means
numerous enough) as a happy idea, emblematic of those
bulwarks of our constitution, the Pension-List, Places, and
Sinecures ; but, it was not until "two pages bearing flam-
beaux filled with burning incense," preceded a young lady
"attired in a white satin robe and mounted on a white pal-
frey," that the joint idea of Mr. Batty and the Lord Mayor
burst upon me. I will not expatiate on the pleasure with
which I found my discovery confirmed by every succeeding
object. I will endeavour to state the idea to you in a tran-
quil manner, and to do justice to Mr. Batty and the Lord
Mayor.
'The Tallow Chandlers' Company,' Mr. Booley proceeds,
'with their Under Beadle and Beadle, I found to be the rep-
resentatives of noxious trades and unwholesome smells ; at
present very rife within the City of London, but shortly to
disappear before the penitent exertions of the Corporation.
The Band of Pensioners, with javelins and shields, were
clearly the persons interested in the maintenance of such
nuisances, though powerless either for attack or defence, and
only following those sources of disease and death into ob-
livion. The burning incense, I need not observe, was used to
purify and disinfect the foul air before the appearance of
the Goddess Hygeia (called Peace in the programme, that
the Allegory might not be too obvious), who was very prop-
erly represented with a spotless dress, and riding on a spotless
palfrey. It was a happy part of this thoughtful fancy, that
the civic authorities, and the Aldermen in their carriages,
had gone before; Mr. Batty and the Lord Mayor being sensi-
ble that until those distinguished functionaries had moved on
a little, and been got out of the way, the appearance of the
Goddess of Health could not possibly be expected.
'The Goddess, that distinguished stranger,' Mr. Booley
goes on to say, 'having been received by the City of London
with loud acclamations, and having been most eagerly and
enthusiastically welcomed by the multitudes, who were to be
seen squeezed into courts, byeways, and cellars, gave place
to "The Horse of Europe" ; in which generous quadruped I
perceived a pledge and promise on the part of the Corpora-
174 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
tion, that filled me with the liveliest emotions. For, not to
dwell upon the significant fact that the body, which it is my
welcome function to commend so highly, paraded, on this
solemn occasion, a Horse, and not a Donkey— which is in itself
worthy of observation : the City having, very frequently here-
tofore, made a surprising show of Donkeys when the Public
Health has been under discussion — I had only to refer to
Buffon, to strengthen my sense of the importance of this
beautiful symbol. "Horses," says he, "are gentle, and their
tempers social; they seldom show their ardour and strength
by any other sign than emulation. They endeavour to be
foremost in the course." And again, "They renounce their
very being for the service of man." And again, "Their man-
ners almost wholly depend on their education." And again,
"A horse naturally morose, gloomy, or stubborn, produces
foals of the same disposition ; and as the defects of confirma-
tion, as well as the vices of the humours, perpetuate with still
more certainty than the natural qualities, great care should be
taken to exclude from the stud all deformed, vicious, glan-
dered, broken-winded, or mad horses." No animal could
have better illustrated the united meaning of Mr. Batty and
the Lord Mayor. The City pledged itself by that token to
show its ardour and strength by emulation in all efforts for
the public good, and to abandon all other considerations
to the service of man. Further, it recognised the great
truth, that the manners of a people depend upon their educa-
tion; and that gloomy, morose, or otherwise ill-conditioned
parents will perpetuate an ill-conditioned and constantly
degenerating race; irksome to itself and dangerous to
all. Hence, it promised to extend, by all possible means,
among the poor, the blessings of light, air, cleanliness,
and instruction; and no longer to enforce filth, squalor,
ill-health, and ignorance, upon thousands of God's creatures.
I was particularly struck,' Mr. Booley remarks, 'by this
beautiful part of the Allegory, and shall ever regard Mr.
Batty and the Lord Mayor with a feeling of personal affec-
tion.
'The Horse of Europe was followed by the Camel of Asia.
And d«fficult, indeed, it would have been,' says Mr. Booley,
MR. BOOLEY'S VIEW 175
'to have presented, next in order, any animal more felicitously
carrying out the general idea. For, the impossibility of
people being healthy and clean without a good and cheap
supply of water, must be as obvious to the meanest capacity,
as even the dearness, bad quality, and insufficient quantity,
of the present supply of water in London. I therefore con-
sider that anything happier than the exhibition at this point
of an animal who is supplied with a subtle inward mechanism
for storing this first necessary of life — who is furnished, as I
may say, with an inexpensive Water Works of its own — was
one of the most agreeable and pointed illustrations ever pre-
sented to a populace. I consider it a stroke of genius, and
beg thus publicly to tender the poor tribute of my warmest
admiration to Mr. Batty and the Lord Mayor.
'After the Camel of Asia, came the Elephant of Africa. I
found this idea, likewise, very pleasant. The exquisite scent
possessed by the elephant rendered it out of the question that
he could have been produced at an earlier stage of the Pro-
cession, or the Tallow-Chandlers, with their Under Beadles,
Beadles, and Band of Pensioners, might have roused him to
a state of fury. Therefore, the Civic Dignitaries and Alder-
men (whose noses are not keen) immediately followed that
ill-savoured Company, and the Elephant was reserved untU
now.
'His capacity of intellectual development under proper
training, his strength and docility, his industry, his many
noble qualities, his patience and attachment under gentle
treatment, and his blind resentment, when provoked too far
by ill-usage, rendered him, besides, a touching symbol of the
great English people; and this idea was still further ex-
pressed by his carrying trophies on his back, expressive of
their enterprise and valour. In parading an animal so well
known for its aversion to carrion, and its liking for clean
provender, the City of London, pleasantly but pointedly,
avowed its determination to seek out and confiscate all im-
proper human food exposed for sale within its liberties, and
particularly to look, with a searching eye, into the knackers'-
yards, and the sausage trade. I almost fancied,' Mr. Booley
proceeds, 'that the sagacious elephant knew his part in the
'
176 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Allegory, and was conscious of the whole Castle of meaning
on his back, as he proceeded gravely on, surveying the crowd
with his small, but highly intelligent eye.
'The two negroes by whom he was led,' Mr. Booley goes
on to remark, 'rather perplexed me. Can it be, that they had
any reference to certain estimable, but pig-headed members
of the Civic Parliament, who learn no wisdom from experi-
ence and instruction ; and in humorous reference to whom, Mr.
Batty and the Lord Mayor suggested the impossibility of
ever washing the Blackamoor white?
'But now,' he adds, 'appeared what I cannot but consider
the crowning feature of the Allegory: in perfect harmony
and keeping with the rest, and pointing directly at the re-
moval of an absurd, a monstrous, and cruel nuisance. I
allude to the "Two Deer of America," whose horns I no
sooner observed advancing along Cheapside, than I immedi-
ately felt that an illusion was intended to Smithfield market.
The little play upon words, in which it was candidly admitted
that that nuisance was Two Dear to the Corporation gener-
ally, might have struck me, perhaps, as rather too obvious,
if I had been disposed to be hypercritical ; but, the introduc-
tion of horned beasts among the crowd was in itself an Alle-
gory, so pointed and yet so ingenious and complete, that I
think I was never better pleased in my life. On further
reflection, I discovered a still more profound and delicate
meaning in the exhibition of these animals. Their associa-
tion with the chase, typified the constant flight and pursuit
going on all over the City, and, indeed, all over the Metrop-
olis, on market-days; while their easy connection in the be-
holder's mind with those periods of English history when it
was a far greater crime to kill a stag than to kill a man, re-
flected with just severity on the obsolete inhumanity and
rapacity of the Corporation that cared for the lives and limbs,
neither of beasts nor men, in the tenacity of its clutch at an
old, pestilential, worn out abuse.
'This,' says Mr. Booley, in conclusion, *is the Allegory that
was presented to the people last Lord Mayor's Day, and
which I have now had the satisfaction of explaining~to the
Social Oysters. I deem it highly honourable to the new Lord
PET PRISONERS 177
Mayor, whom I cordially wish a prosperous and happy reign ;
together with a vigorous determination to do his utmost to
carry out the needful reforms, and remedy the crying evils,
so ably glanced at, by himself, on this auspicious occasion.
As I dined in the Guildhall after the show, I had the honour
of giving utterance to these wishes (but not within his hear-
ing) after dinner; when, remembering this Allegory, I di-
vined a new meaning in the Loving Cup, and was charmed to
find the first city in the universe bravely devoting its charter
and liberties to the welfare of the community, and not poorly
sheltering itself behind them as an immunity from the plainest
human responsibilities. I had the honour and pleasure of
drinking his lordship's health in a bumper of very excellent
wine; and I should have been happy to have drunk to Mr.
Batty too, if his health had been proposed, which it was not/
PET PRISONERS
[APRIL 27, 1850]
THE system of separate confinement first experimented on
in England at the model prison, Pentonville, London, and
now spreading through the country, appears to us to require
a little calm consideration and reflection on the part of the
public. We purpose, in this paper, to suggest what we con-
sider some grave objections to this system.
We shall do this temperately, and without considering it
necessary to regard every one from whom we differ, as a
scoundrel, actuated by base motives, to whom the most un-
principled conduct may be recklessly attributed. Our faith
in most questions where the good men are represented to be
all pro, and the bad men to be all con, is very small. There
is a hot class of riders of hobby-horses in the field, in this
century, who think they do nothing unless they make a
steeple-chase of their object, throw a vast quantity of mud
about, and spurn every sort of decent restraint and reason-
able consideration under their horses' heels. This question has
not escaped such championship. It has its steeple-chase
riders, who hold the dangerous principle that the end justi-
178 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
fics any means, and to whom no means, truth and fair-dealing
usually excepted, come amiss.
Considering the separate system of imprisonment, here,
solely in reference to England, we discard, for the purpose
of this discussion, the objection founded on its extreme
severity, which would immediately arise if we were consid-
ering it with any reference to the State of Pennsylvania in
America. For whereas in that State it may be inflicted for
a dozen years, the idea is quite abandoned at home of extend-
ing it usually, beyond a dozen months, or in any case beyond
eighteen months. Besides which, the school and the chapel
afford periods of comparative relief here, which are not af-
forded in America.
Though it has been represented by the steeple-chase riders
as a most enonnous heresy to contemplate the possibility of
any prisoner going mad or idiotic, under the prolonged ef-
fects of separate confinement ; and although any one who
should have the temerity to maintain such a doubt in Penn-
sylvania would have a chance of becoming a profane St.
Stephen ; Lord Grey, in his very last speech in the House of
Lords on this subject, made in the present session of Parlia-
ment, in praise of this separate system, said of it: 'Wher-
ever it has been fairly tried, one of its great defects has been
discovered to be this, — that it cannot be continued for a suf-
ficient length of time without danger to the individual, and
that human nature cannot bear it beyond a limited period.
The evidence of medical authorities proves beyond dispute
that, if it is protracted beyond twelve months, the health of
the convict, mental and physical, would require the most
close and vigilant superintendence. Eighteen months is
stated to be the maximum time for the continuance of its in-
fliction, and, as a general rule, it is advised that it never be
continued for more than twelve months.' This being con-
ceded, and it being clear that the prisoner's mind, and all the
apprehensions weighing upon it, must be influenced from the
first hour of his imprisonment by the greater or less extent
of its duration in perspective before him, we are content to
regard the system as dissociated in England from the Amer-
ican objection of too great severity.
PET PRISONERS 179
We shall consider it, first in the relation of the extraordi-
nary contrast it presents, in a country circumstanced as Eng-
land is, between the physical condition of the convict in
prison, and that of the hard-working man outside, or the
pauper outside. We shall then inquire, and endeavour to lay
before our readers some means of judging, whether its proved
or probable efficiency in producing a real, trustworthy, prac-
tically repentant state of mind, is such as to justify the pre-
sentation of that extraordinary contrast. If, in the end, we
indicate the conclusion that the associated silent system is
less objectionable, it is not because we consider it in the ab-
stract a good secondary punishment, but because it is a
severe one, capable of judicious administration, much less ex-
pensive, not presenting the objectionable contrast so strongly,
and not calculated to pet and pamper the mind of the pris-
oner and swell his sense of his own importance. We are not
acquainted with any system of secondary punishment that we
think reformatory, except the mark system of Captain Mac-
connochie, formerly governor of Norfolk Island, which pro-
ceeds upon the principle of obliging the convict to some exer-
cise of self-denial and resolution in every act of his prison
life, and which would condemn him to a sentence of so much
labour and good conduct instead of so much time. There are
details in Captain Macconnochie's scheme on which we have
our doubts (rigid silence we consider indispensable) ; but, in
the main, we regard it as embodying sound and wise princi-
ples. We infer from the writings of Archbishop Whateley,
that those principles have presented themselves to his pro-
found and acute mind in a similar light.
We will first contrast the dietary of The Model Prison at
Pentonville, with the dietary of what we take to be the nearest
workhouse, namely, that of Saint Pancras. In the prison,
every man receives twenty-eight ounces of meat weekly. In
the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives eighteen. In
the prison, every man receives one hundred and forty ounces
of bread weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult
receives ninety-six. In the prison, every man receives one
hundred and twelve ounces of potatoes weekly. In the work-
house, every able-bodied adult receives thirty-six. In the
^
180 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
prison, every man receives five pints and a quarter of liquid
cocoa weekly (made of flaked cocoa or cocoa-nibs), with
fourteen ounces of milk and forty-two drams of molasses;
also seven pints of gruel weekly, sweetened with forty-two
drams of molasses. In the workhouse, every able-bodied
adult receives fourteen pints and a half of milk-porridge
weekly, and no cocoa, and no gruel. In the prison, every
man receives three pints and a half of soup weekly. In the
workhouse, every able-bodied adult male receives four pints
and a half, and a pint of Irish stew. This, with seven pints
of table-beer weekly, and six ounces of cheese, is all the man
in the workhouse has to set off against the immensely superior
advantages of the prisoner in all other respects we have stated.
His lodging is very inferior to the prisoner's, the costly
nature of whose accommodation we shall presently show.
Let us reflect upon this contrast in another aspect. We
beg the reader to glance once more at The Model Prison
dietarv, and consider its frightful disproportion to the diet-
ary of the free labourer in any of the rural parts of Eng-
land. What shall we take his wages at? Will twelve shill-
ings a week do? It cannot be called a low average, at all
events. Twelve shillings a week make thirty-one pounds four
a year. The cost, in 1848, for the victualling and manage-
ment of every prisoner in the Model Prison was within a
little of thirty-six pounds. Consequently, that free labourer,
with young children to support, with cottage-rent to pay,
and clothes to buy, and no advantage of purchasing his food
in large amounts by contract, has, for the whole subsistence
of himself and family, between four and five pounds a year
less than the cost of feeding and overlooking one man in the
Model Prison. Surely to his enlightened mind, and some-
times low morality, this must be an extraordinary good reason
for keeping out of it !
But we will not confine ourselves to the contrast between
the labourer's scanty fare and the prisoner's 'flaked cocoa
or cocoa-nibs,' and daily dinner of soup, meat, and potatoes.
We will rise a little higher in the scale. Let us see what
advertisers in the Times newspaper can board the middle
classes at, and get a profit out of, too.
PET PRISONERS 181
A LADY, residing in a cottage, with a large garden, in a
•**• pleasant and healthful locality, would be happy to receive
one or two LADIES to BOARD with her. Two ladies occupy-
ing the same apartment may be accommodated for 12s. a week
each. The cottage is within a quarter of an hour's walk of a
good market town, 10 minutes' of a South-Western Railway
Station, and an hour's distance from town.
These two ladies could not be so cheaply boarded in the
Model Prison.
r>OARD and RESIDENCE, at £70 per annum, for a mar-
*~^ Tied couple, or in proportion for a single gentleman or
lady, with a respectable family. Rooms large and airy, in an
eligible dwelling, at Islington, about 20 minutes' walk from the
Bank. Dinner hour six o'clock. There are one or two vacan-
cies to complete a small, cheerful, and agreeable circle.
Still cheaper than the Model Prison !
gOARD and RESIDENCE.— A lady, keeping a select school,
*^ in a town, about 30 miles from London, would be happy to
meet with a LADY to BOARD and RESIDE with her. She
would have her own bedroom and a sitting-room. Any lady
wishing for accomplishments would find this desirable. Terms
£30 per annum. References will be expected and given.
Again, some six pounds a year less than the Model Prison !
And if we were to pursue the contrast through the news-
paper file for a month, or through the advertising pages of
two or three numbers of Bradshaw's Railway Guide, we
might probably fill the present number of this publication
with similar examples, many of them including a decent edu-
cation into the bargain.
This Model Prison had cost at the close of 1847, under
the heads of 'building' and 'repairs' alone, the insignificant
sum of ninety-three thousand pounds — within seven thousand
pounds of the amount of the last Government grant for the
Education of the whole people, and enough to pay for the
emigration to Australia of four thousand, six hundred and
fifty poor persons at twenty pounds per head. Upon the
work done by five hundred prisoners in the Model Prison,
in the year 1848 (we collate these figures from the Reports,
182 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and from Mr. Hepworth Dixon's useful work on the London
Prisons), there was no profit, but an actual loss of upwards
of eight hundred pounds. The cost of instruction, and the
time occupied in instruction, when the labour is necessarily
unskilled and unproductive, may be pleaded in explanation
of this astonishing fact. We are ready to allow all due
weight to such considerations, but we put it to our readers
whether the whole system is right or wrong; whether the
money ought or ought not rather to be spent in instructing
the unskilled and neglected outside the prison walls. It will
be urged that it is expended in preparing the convict for the
exile to which he is doomed. We submit to our readers, who
are the jury in this case, that all this should be done outside
the prison, first; that the first persons to be prepared for
emigration are the miserable children who are consigned to
the tender mercies of a Drouet, or who disgrace our streets ;
and that in this beginning at the wrong end, a spectacle of
monstrous inconsistency is presented, shocking to the mind.
Where is our Model House of Youthful Industry, where is
our Model Ragged School, costing, for building and repairs,
from ninety to a hundred thousand pounds, and for its an-
nual maintenance upwards of twenty thousand pounds a
year? Would it be a Christian act to build that, first? To
breed our skilful labour there? To take the hewers of wood
and drawers of water in a strange country from the convict
ranks, until those men by earnest working, zeal, and persever-
ance, proved themselves, and raised themselves? Here are
two sets of people in a densely populated land, always in the
balance before the general eye. Is Crime for ever to carry
it against Poverty, and to have a manifest advantage?
There are the scales before all men. Whirlwinds of dust
scattered in men's eyes — and there is plenty flving about —
cannot blind them to the real state of the balance.
We now come to inquire into the condition of mind pro-
duced by the seclusion (limited in duration as Lord Grey
limits it) which is purchased at this great cost in money, and
this greater cost in stupendous injustice. That it is a con-
summation much to be desired, that a respectable man, laps-
ing into crime, should expiate his offence without incurring
PET PRISONERS 183
the liability of being afterwards recognised by hardened
offenders who were his fellow-prisoners, we most readily ad-
mit. But, that this object, howsoever desirable and benev-
olent, is in itself sufficient to outweigh such objections as
we have set forth, we cannot for a moment concede. Nor
have we any sufficient guarantee that even this solitary point
is gained. Under how many apparently insuperable difficul-
ties, men immured in solitary cells, will by some means ob-
tain a knowledge of other men immured in other solitary
cells, most of us know from all the accounts and anecdotes
we have read of secret prisons and secret prisoners from our
school-time upwards. That there is a fascination in the
desire to know something of the hidden presence beyond the
blank wall of the cell ; that the listening ear is often laid
against that wall; that there is an overpowering temptation
to respond to the muffled knock, or any other signal which
sharpened ingenuity pondering day after day on one
idea can devise : is in that constitution of human nature which
impels mankind to communication with one another, and
makes solitude a false condition against which nature strives.
That such communication within the Model Prison, is not
only probable, but indisputably proved to be possible by its
actual discovery, we have no hesitation in stating as a fact.
Some pains have been taken to hush the matter, but the truth
is, that when the Prisoners at Pentonville ceased to be selected
Prisoners, especially picked out and chosen for the purposes
of that experiment, an extensive conspiracy was found out
among them, involving, it is needless to say, extensive com-
munication. Small pieces of paper with writing upon them,
had been crushed into balls, and shot into the apertures of cell
doors, by prisoners passing along the passages ; false re-
sponses had been made during Divine Service in the chapel,
in which responses they addressed one another; and armed
men were secretly dispersed by the Governor in various parts
of the building, to prevent the general rising, which was
anticipated as the consequence of this plot. Undiscovered
communication, under this system, we assume to be frequent.
The state of mind into which a man is brought who is the
lonely inhabitant of his own small world, and who is only
184 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
visited by certain regular visitors, all addressing themselves
to him individually and personally, as the object of
particular solicitude— we believe in most cases to have very
little promise in it, and very little of solid foundation. A
strange absorbing selfishness— a spiritual egotism and van-
ity, real or assumed— is the first result. It is most remark-
able to observe, in the cases of murderers who become this
kind of object of interest, when they are at last consigned to
the condemned cell, how the rule is (of course there are excep-
tions), that the murdered person disappears from the stage of
their thoughts, except as a part of their own important story ;
and how they occupy ,the whole scene. / did this, / feel that,
/ confide in the mercy of Heaven being extended to me;
this is the autograph of me, the unfortunate and unhappy ;
in my childhood I was so and so ; in my youth I did such a
thing, to which I attribute my downfall — not this thing of
basely and barbarously defacing the image of my Creator,
and sending an immortal soul into eternity without a mor
ment's warning, but something else of a venial kind that
many unpunished people do. I don't want the forgiveness
of this foully murdered person's bereaved wife, husband,
brother, sister, child, friend; I don't ask for it, I don't care
for it. I make no inquiry of the clergyman concerning the
salvation of that murdered person's soul; mine is the mat-
ter; and I am almost happy that I came here, as to the gate
of Paradise. *I never liked him,' said the repentant Mr.
Manning, false of heart to the last, calling a crowbar by a
milder name, to lessen the cowardly horror of it, 'and I beat
in his skull with the ripping chisel.' I am going to bliss,
exclaims the same authority, in effect. Where my victim
went to, is not my business at all. Now, God forbid that we,
unworthily believing in the Redeemer, should shut out hope,
01 even humble trustfulness, from any criminal at that dread
pass ; but, it is not in us to call this state of mind repentance.
The present question is with a state of mind analogous to
this (as we conceive) but with a far stronger tendency to
hypocrisy ; the dread of death not being present, and there
being every possible inducement, either to feign contrition,
or to set up an unreliable semblance of it. If I, John Styles,
PET PRISONERS 183
the prisoner, don't do my work, and outwardly conform to
the rules of the prison, I am a mere fool. There is nothing
here to tempt me to do anything else, and everything to
tempt me to do that. The capital dietary (and every meal is
a great event in this lonely life) depends upon it ; the alterna-
tive is a pound of bread a day. I should be weary of myself
without occupation. I should be much more dull if I didn't
hold these dialogues with the gentlemen who are so anxious
about me. I shouldn't be half the object of interest I am,
if I didn't make the professions I do. Therefore, I John
Styles go in for what is popular here, and I may mean it, or
I may not.
There will always, under any decent system, be certain
prisoners betrayed into crime by a variety of circumstances,
who will do well in exile, and offend against the laws no more.
Upon this class, we think the Associated Silent System would
have quite as good an influence as this expensive and anoma-
lous one ; and we cannot accept them as evidence of the effi-
ciency of separate confinement. Assuming John Styles to
mean what he professes, for the time being, we -desire to
track the workings of his mind, and to try to test the value
of his professions. Where shall we find an account of John
Styles, proceeding from no objector to this system, but from
a staunch supporter of it? We will take it from a work
called 'Prison Discipline, and the advantages of the separate
system of imprisonment,' written by the Reverend Mr. Field,
chaplain of the new County Gaol at Reading; pointing out
to Mr. Field, in passing, that the question is not justly, as he
would sometimes make it, a question between this system and
the profligate abuses and customs of the old unreformed
gaols, but between it and the improved gaols of this time,
which are not constructed on his favourite principles.1
iAs Mr. Field condescends to quote some vapouring about the ac-
count given by Mr. Charles Dickens in his American Notes, of the
Solitary Prison at Philadelphia, he may perhaps really wish for some
few words of information on the subject. For this purpose, Mr.
Charles Dickens has referred to the entry in his Diary, made at the
close of that day.
He left his hotel for the Prison at twelve o'clock, being waited on, by
appointment, by the gentlemen who showed it to him; and he returned
between seven and eight at night; dining in the Prison in the course
186
Now, here is John Styles, twenty years of age, in prison
for a felony. He has been there five months, and he writes
to his sister, 'Don't fret, my dear sister, about my being
here. I cannot help fretting when I think about my usage to
my father and mother: when I think about it, it makes me
quite ill. I hope God will forgive me; I pray for it night
and day from my heart. Instead of fretting about impris-
of that time; which, according to his calculation, in despite of the
Philadelphia Nev.-spaper, rather exceeds two hours. He found the
Prison admirably conducted, extremely clean, and the system adminis-
tered in a most intelligent, kind, orderly, tender, and careful manner.
He did not consider (nor should he, if he were to visit Pentonville to-
morrow) that the book in which visitors were expected to record their
observation of {'..2 place, was intended for the insertion of criticisms on
the system, but for honest testimony to the manner of its administra-
tion- and to that, he bore, as an impartial visitor, the highest testimony
in his power. In returning thanks for his health being drunk, at the
dinner within the walls, he said that what he had seen that day was
running in his mind; that he could not help reflecting on it; and that
it was an awful punishment. If the American officer who rode buck
with him afterwards should ever see these words, he will perhaps recall
his conversation with Air. Dickens on the road, as to Mr. Dickens
having said so very plainly and strongly. In reference to the ridiculous
assertion that Mr. Dickens in his book termed a woman 'quite beauti-
ful' who was a Negress, he positively believes that he was shown no
Negress in the Prison, but one who was nursing a woman much diseased,
and to whom no reference whatever is made in his published account.
In describing three young women, 'all convicted at the same time of a
conspiracy,' he may, possibly, among many cases, have substituted in
his me:nory for one of them whom he did not see, some other prisoner,
con lined for some other crime, whom he did see; but he has not the
least doubt of having been guilty of the (American) enormity of de-
tecting beauty in a pensive quadroon or mulatto girl, or of having
seen exactly what he describes; and he remembers the girl more par-
ticularly described in this connection, perfectly. Can Mr. Field really
suppose that Mr. Dickens had any interest or purpose in misrepre-
senting the system, or that if he could be guilty of such unworthy con-
duct, or desire to do it anything but justice, he would have volunteered
the narrative of a man's having, of his own choice, undergone it for
two years?
We will not notice the objection of Mr. Field (who strengthens the
truth of Burns to nature, by the testimony of Mr. Pitt!) to the dis-
cussion of such a topic as the present in a work of 'mere amusement';
though, we had thought we remembered in that book a word or two
about slavery, which, although very amusing, can scarcely be considered
an unmitigatedly comic theme. We are quite content to believe, without
seeking to make a convert of the Reverend Mr. Field, that no work need
be one of 'mere amusement'; and that some works to which he would
apply that designation have done a little good in advancing principles
to which, we hope, and will believe, for the credit of his Christian office,
he is not indifferent.
PET PRISONERS 187
onment, I ought to thank God for it, for before I came here,
I was living quite a careless life ; neither was God in all mv
thoughts ; all I thought about was ways that led me towards
destruction. Give my respects to my wretched companions,
and I hope they will alter their wicked course, for they don't
know for a day nor an hour but what they may be cut off.
I have seen my folly, and I hope they may see their folly;
but I shouldn't if I had not been in trouble. It is good for
me that I have been in trouble. Go to church, my sister,
every Sunday, and don't give your mind to going to play-
houses and theatres, for that is no good to you. There are
a great many temptations.'
Observe ! John Styles, who has committed the felony, has
been 'living quite a careless life.' That is his worst opinion
of it, whereas his companions, who did not commit the felony,
are 'wretched companions.' John saw his 'folly,' and sees
their 'wicked course.' It is playhouses and theatres which
many unfelonious people go to, that prey upon John's mind
— not felony. John is shut up in that pulpit to lecture his
companions and his sister about the wickedness of the un-
felonious world. Always supposing him to be sincere, is
there no exaggeration of himself in this? Go to church
where I can go, and don't go to theatres where I can't ! Is
there any tinge of the fox and the grapes in it? Is this the
kind of penitence that will wear outside! Put the case that
he had written, of his own mind, 'My dear sister, I feel that
I have disgraced you and all who should be dear to me, and
if it please God that I live to be free, I will try hard to
repair that, and to be a credit to you. My dear sister, when
I committed this felony, I stole something — and these pining
five months have not put it back — and I will work my fingers
to the bone to make restitution, and oh! my dear sister, seek
out my late companions, and tell Tom Jones, that poor boy,
who was younger and littler than me, that I am grieved I
ever led him so wrong, and I am suffering for it now !'
Would that be better? Would it be more like solid truth?
But no. This is not the pattern penitence. There would
seem to be a pattern penitence, of a particular form, shape,
limits, and dimensions, like the cells. While Mr. Field is
188 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
correcting his proof-sheets for the press, another letter is
brought to him, and in that letter, too, that man, also a
felon, speaks of his 'past folly,' and lectures his mother about
labouring under 'strong delusions of the devil.' Does this
overwhelming readiness to lecture other people, suggest the
suspicion of any parrot-like imitation of Mr. Field, who
lectures him, and any presumptuous confounding of their
relative positions?
We venture altogether to protest against the citation, in
support of this S3rstem, of assumed repentance which has
stood no test or trial in the working world. We consider that
it proves nothing, and is worth nothing, except as a dis-
couraging sign of that spiritual egotism and presumption of
which we have already spoken. It is not peculiar to the
separate system at Reading ; Miss Martineau, who was on the
whole decidedly favourable to the separate prison at Phil-
adelphia, observed it there. 'The cases I became acquainted
with,' says she, 'were not all hopeful. Some of the convicts
were so stupid as not to be relied upon, more or less. Others
canted so detestably, and were (always in connection with
their cant) so certain that they should never sin more, that
I have every expectation that they will find themselves in
prison again some day. One fellow, a sailor, notorious for
having taken more lives than probably any man in the
United States, was quite confident that he should be perfectly
virtuous henceforth. He should never touch anything
stronger than tea, or lift his hand against money or life. I
told him I thought he could not be sure of all this till he was
within sight of money and the smell of strong liquors; and
that he was more confident than I should like to be. He
shook his shock of red hair at me, and glared with his one
ferocious eye, as he said he knew all about it. He had been
the worst of men, and Christ had had mercy on his poor soul.'
(Observe again, as in the general case we have put, that he
is not at all troubled about the souls of the people whom he
had killed.)
Let us submit to our readers another instance from Mr.
Field, of the wholesome state of mind produced by the
separate system. 'The 25th of March, in the last year, was
PET PRISONERS 189
the day appointed for a general fast, on account of the
threatened famine. The following note is in my journal
of that day. "During the evening I visited many prison-
ers, and found with much satisfaction that a large proportion
of them had observed the day in a manner becoming their
own situation, and the purpose for which it had been set
apart. I think it right to record the following remarkable
proof of the effect of discipline. . . . They were all sup-
plied with their usual rations. I went first this evening to
the cells of the prisoners recently committed for trial (Ward
A. 1), and amongst these (upwards of twenty) I found that
but three had abstained from any portion of their food. I
then visited twenty-one convicted prisoners who had spent
some considerable time in the gaol (Ward C. 1), and amongst
them I found that some had altogether abstained from food,
and of the whole number two-thirds had partially ab-
stained." We will take it for granted that this was not
because they had more than they could eat, though we know
that with such a dietary even that sometimes happens, espe-
cially in the case of persons long confined. 'The remark of
one prisoner whom I questioned concerning his abstinence
was, I believe, sincere, and was very pleasing. "Sir, I have
not felt able to eat to-day, whilst I have thought of those
poor starving people ; but I hope that I have prayed a good
deal that God will give them something to eat."
If this were not pattern penitence, and the thought of
those poor starving people had honestly originated with that
man, and were really on his mind, we want to know why he
was not uneasy, every day, in' the contemplation of his soup,
meat, bread, potatoes, cocoa-nibs, milk, molasses, and gruel,
and its contrast to the fare of 'those poor starving people'
who, in some form or other, were taxed to pay for it?
We do not deem it necessary to comment on the authori-
ties quoted by Mr. Field to show what a fine thing the sep-
arate system is, for the health of the body; how it never
affects the mind except for good; how it is the true pre-
ventive of pulmonary disease ; and so on. The deduction we
must draw from such things is, that Providence was quite
mistaken in making us gregarious, and that we had better all
190 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
shut ourselves up directly. Neither will we refer to that
Halented criminal,' Dr. Dodd, whose exceedingly indifferent
verses applied to a system now extinct, in reference to our
penitentiaries for convicted prisoners. Neither, after what
we have quoted from Lord Grey, need we refer to the like-
wise quoted report of the American authorities, who are
perfectly sure that no extent of confinement in the Philadel-
phia prison has ever affected the intellectual powers of any
prisoner. Mr. Croker cogently observes, in the Good-
Natured Man, that either his hat must be on his head or it
must be off. By a parity of reasoning, we conclude that
both Lord Grey and the American authorities, cannot pos-
sibly be right — unless indeed the notoriously settled habits
of the American people, and the absence of any approach to
restlessness in the national character, render them unusually
good subjects for protracted seclusion, and an exception from
the rest of mankind.
In using the term 'pattern penitence' we beg it to be
understood that we do not apply it to Mr. Field, or to any
other chaplain, but to the system ; which appears to us to
make these doubtful converts all alike. Although Mr. Field
has not shown any remarkable courtesy in the instance we
have set forth in a note, it is our wish to show all courtesy
to him, and to his office, and to his sincerity in the discharge
of its duties. In our desire to represent him with fairness
and impartiality, we will not take leave of him without the
following quotation from his book :
'Scarcely sufficient time has yet expired, since the present sys-
tem was introduced, for me to report much concerning discharged
criminals. Out of a class so degraded — the very dregs of the
community — it can be no wonder that some, of whose improve-
ment I cherished the hope, should have relapsed. Disappointed
in a few cases I have been, yet by no means discouraged, since
I can with pleasure refer to many whose conduct is affording
proof of reformation. Gratifying indeed have been some ac-
counts received from liberated offenders themselves, as well as
from clergymen of parishes to which they have returned. I
have also myself visited the homes of some of our former prison-
ers, and have been cheered by the testimony given, and the evi-
PET PRISONERS 191
dent signs of improved character which I have there observed.
Although I do not venture at present to describe the particular
cases of prisoners, concerning whose reformation I feel much
confidence, because, as I have stated, the time of trial has hitherto
been short; yet I can with pleasure refer to some public docu-
ments which prove the happy effects of similar discipline in other
establishments.'
It should also be stated that the Reverend Mr. Kingsmill,
the chaplain of the Model Prison at Pentonville, in his calm
and intelligent report made to the Commissioners on the first
of February 1849, expresses his belief 'that the effects pro-
duced here upon the character of prisoners, have been encour-
aging in a high degree.'
But, we entreat our readers once again to look at that
Model Prison dietary (which is essential to the system, though
the system is so very healthy of itself) ; to remember the
other enormous expenses of the establishment ; to consider
the circumstances of this old country, with the inevitable
anomalies and contrasts it must present ; and to decide on
temperate reflection, whether there are any sufficient reasons
for adding this monstrous contrast to the rest. Let us im-
press upon our readers that the existing question is, not be-
tween this system and the old abuses of the old profligate
gaols (with which, thank Heaven, we have nothing to do),
but between this system, and the associated silent system,
where the dietary is much lower, where the annual cost of
provision, management, repairs, clothing, etc., does not ex-
ceed, on a liberal average, £25 for each prisoner ; where many
prisoners are, and every prisoner would be (if due accom-
modation were provided in some overcrowded prisons), locked
up alone, for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and
where, while preserved from contamination, he is still one of
a society of men, and not an isolated being, filling his whole
sphere of view with a diseased dilation of himself. We hear
that the associated silent system is objectionable, because of
the number of punishments it involves for breaches of the
prison discipline; but how can we, in the same breath, be
told that the resolutions of prisoners for the misty future are
to be trusted, and that, on the least temptation, they are so
little to be relied on, as to the solid present? How can I
set the pattern penitence against the career that preceded it,
when I am told that if I put that man with other men, and
lay a solemn charge upon him not to address them by word
or sign, there are such and such great chances that he will
want the resolution to obey?
Remember that this separate system, though commended
in the English Parliament and spreading in England, has not
spread in America, despite of all the steeplechase riders in
the United States. Remember that it has never reached the
State most distinguished for its learning, for its moderation,
for its remarkable men of European reputation, for the
excellence of its public Institutions. Let it be tried here, on
a limited scale, if you will, with fair representatives of all
classes of prisoners: let Captain Macconnochie's system be
tried: let anything with a ray of hope in it be tried: but,
only as a part of some general system for raising up the
prostrate portion of the people of this country, and not as
an exhibition of such astonishing consideration for crime, in
comparison with want and work. Any prison built, at a
great expenditure, for this system, is comparatively useless
for any other; and the ratepayers will do well to think of
this, before they take it for granted that it is a proved boon
to the country which will be enduring.
Under the separate system, the prisoners work at trades.
Under the associated silent system, the Magistrates of Mid-
dlesex have almost abolished the treadmill. Is it no part of
the legitimate consideration of this important point of work,
to discover what kind of work the people always filtering
through the gaols of large towns — the pickpocket, the sturdy
vagrant, the habitual drunkard, and the begging-letter im-
postor— like least, and to give them that work to do in prefer-
ence to any other? It is out of fashion with the steeple-
chase riders we know ; but we would have, for all such char-
acters, a kind of work in gaols, badged and degraded as be-
longing to gaols only, and never done elsewhere. And we
must avow that, in a country circumstanced as England is,
with respect to labour and labourers, we have strong doubts
of the propriety of bringing the results of prison labour into
OLD LAMPS FOR NEW ONES 193
the overstocked market. On this subject some public re-
monstrances have recently been made by tradesmen ; and we
cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they are well founded.
OLD LAMPS FOR NEW ONES
[JUNE 15, 1850]
THE magician in Aladdin may possibly have neglected the
study of men, for the study of alchemical books ; but it is
certain that in spite of his profession he was no conjuror.
He knew nothing of human nature, or the everlasting set of
the current of human affairs. If, when he fraudulently
sought to obtain possession of the wonderful Lamp, and
went up and down, disguised, before the flying-palace, crying
New Lamps for Old ones, he had reversed his cry, and made
it Old Lamps for New ones, he would have been so far be-
fore his time as to have projected himself into the nineteenth
century of our Christian Era.
This age is so perverse, and is so very short of faith — in
consequence, as some suppose, of there having been a run
on that bank for a few generations — that a parallel and
beautiful idea, generally known among the ignorant as the
young England hallucination, unhappily expired before it
could run alone, to the great grief of a small but a very
select circle of mourners. There is something so fascinating,
to a mind capable of any serious reflection, in the notion of
ignoring all that has been done for the happiness and eleva-
tion of mankind during three or four centuries of slow and
dearly-bought amelioration, that we have always thought it
would tend soundly to the improvement of the general pub-
lic, if any tangible symbol, any outward and visible sign,
expressive of that admirable conception, could be held up
before them. We are happy to have found such a sign at
last ; and although it would make a very indifferent sign,
indeed, in the Licensed Victualling sense of the word, and
would probably be rejected with contempt and horror by any
194 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Christian publican, it has our warmest philosophical appre-
ciation.
In the fifteenth century, a certain feeble lamp of art arose
in the Italian town of Urbino. This poor light, Raphael
Sanzio by name, better known to a few miserably mistaken
wretches in these later days, as Raphael (another burned at
the same time called Titian), was fed with a preposterous
idea of Beauty — with a ridiculous power of etherealising and
exalting to the very Heaven of Heavens, what was most
sublime and lovely in the expression of the human face divine
on Earth — with the truly contemptible conceit of finding in
poor humanity the fallen likeness of the angels of God, and
raising it up again to their pure spiritual condition. This
very fantastic whim effected a low revolution in Art, in this
wise, that Beauty came to be regarded as one of its indispensa-
ble elements. In this very poor delusion, artists have contin-
ued until this present nineteenth century, when it was reserved
for some bold aspirants to 'put it down.'
The pre-Raphael Brotherhood, Ladies and Gentlemen, is
the dread Tribunal which is to set this matter right. Walk
up, walk up; and here, conspicuous on the wall of the Rova!
Academy of Art in England, in the eighty-second year of
their annual exhibition, you shall see what this new Holy
Brotherhood, this terrible Police that is to disperse all Post-
Raphael offenders, has been and done !
You come — in this Royal Academy Exhibition, which is
familiar with the works of Wilkie, Collins, Etty, Eastlake,
Mulready, Leslie, Maclise, Turner, Stanfield , Landseer,
Roberts, Danby, Creswick, Lee, Webster, Herbert, Dyce,
Cope, and others who would have been renowned as great
masters in any age or country — you come, in this place, to
the contemplation of a Holy Family. You will have the
goodness to discharge from your minds, all Post-Raphael
ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts; all
tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or
beautiful associations; and to prepare yourselves, as befits
such a subject— pre-Raphaclly considered — for the lowest
depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting.
You behold the interior of a carpenter's shop. In the fore-
OLD LAMPS FOR NEW ONES 195
ground of that carpenter's shop is a hideous, wry-necked,
blubbering red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to
have received a poke in the hand from the stick of another
boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter,
and to be holding it up for the, contemplation of a kneeling
woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were
possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with
that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of
the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or
the lowest gin-shop in England. Two almost naked carpen-
ters, master and journeymen, worthy companions of this
agreeable female, are working at their trade ; a boy, with
some small flavour of humanity in him, is entering with a
vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a
snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for
the tobacconist's next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at
the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite
mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of fea-
ture, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as
the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where
dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins are re-
ceived. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles's.
This, in the nineteenth century, and in the eighty-second
year of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of
Art, is the Pre-Raphael representation to us, Ladies and
Gentlemen, of the most solemn passage which our minds can
ever approach. This, in the nineteenth century, and in the
eighty-second year of the annual exhibition of the National
Academy of Art, is what Pre-Raphael Art can do to render
reverence and homage to the faith in which we live and die!
Consider this picture well. Consider the pleasure we should
have in a similar Pre-Raphael rendering of a favourite horse,
or dog, or cat ; and, coming fresh from a pretty considerable
turmoil about 'desecration' in connection with the National
Post Office, let us extol this great achievement, and commend
the National Academy.
In further considering this symbol of the great retro-
gressive principle, it is particularly gratifying to observe
that such objects as the shavings which are strewn on the
196 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
carpenter's floor are admirably painted; and that the Pre-
Raphael Brother is indisputably accomplished in the manip-
ulation of his art. It is gratifying to observe this, because
the fact involves no low effort at notoriety ; everybody know-
ing that it is by no means easier to call attention to a very
indifferent pig with five legs than to a symmetrical pig with
four. Also, because it is good to know that the National
Academy thoroughly feels and comprehends the high range
and exalted purposes of art; distinctly perceives that art
includes something more than the faithful portraiture of
shavings, or the skilful colouring of drapery — imperatively
requires, in short, that it shall be informed with mind and
sentiment ; will on no account reduce it to a narrow question
of trade- juggling with a palette, palette-knife, and paint-
box. It is likewise pleasing to reflect that the great educa-
tional establishment foresees the difficulty into which it would
be led, by attaching greater weight to mere handicraft, than
to any other consideration — even to considerations of com-
mon reverence or decency ; which absurd principle in the
event of a skilful painter of the figure becoming a very little
more perverted in his taste, than certain skilful painters are
just now, might place Her Gracious Majesty in a very pain-
ful position, one of these fine Private View Days.
Would it were in our power to congratulate our read-
ers on the hopeful prospects of the great retrogressive
principle, of which this thoughtful picture is the sign and
emblem! Would that we could give our readers encourag-
ing assurance of a healthy demand for Old Lamps in ex-
change for New ones, and a steady improvement in the Old
Lamp Market! The perversity of mankind is such, and
the untoward arrangements of Providence are such, that we
cannot lay that flattering unction to their souls. We can
only report what Brotherhoods, stimulated by this sign, are
forming; and what opportunities will be presented to the
people, if the people will but accept them.
In the first place, the Pre-Perspective Brotherhood will be
presently incorporated, for the subversion of all known rules
and principles of perspective. It is intended to swear every
P.P.B. to a solemn renunciation of the art of perspective on
197
a soup-plate of the willow pattern; and we may expect on
the occasion of the eighty-third annual exhibition of the
Royal Academy of Art in England, to see some pictures by
this pious Brotherhood, realising Hogarth's idea of a man
on a mountain several miles off, lighting his pipe at the
upper window of a house in the foreground. But we are
informed that every brick in the house will be a portrait;
that the man's boots will be copied with the utmost fidelity
from a pair of Bluchers sent up out of Northamptonshire
for the purpose; and that the texture of his hands (includ-
ing four chilblains, a whitlow, and ten dirty nails) will be
a triumph of the painter's art.
A Society, to be called the Pre-Newtonian Brotherhood,
was lately projected by a young gentleman, under articles
to a Civil Engineer, who objected to being considered bound
to conduct himself according to the laws of gravitation.
But this young gentleman, being reproached by some aspir-
ing companions with the timidity of his conception, has
abrogated that idea in favour of a Pre-Galileo Brotherhood
now flourishing, who distinctly refuse to perform any annual
revolution round the sun, and have arranged that the world
shall not do so any more. The course to be taken by the
Royal Academy of Art in reference to this Brotherhood is
not yet decided upon; but it is wrhispered that some other
large educational Institutions in the neighbourhood of Ox-
ford are nearly ready to pronounce in favour of it.
Several promising students connected with the Royal Col-
lege of Surgeons have held a meeting, to protest against the
circulation of the blood, and to pledge themselves to treat
all the patients they can get, on principles condemnatory of
that innovation. A Pre-Harvey Brotherhood is the result,
from which a great deal may be expected — by the under-
takers.
In Literature, a very spirited effort has been made, which
is no less than the formation of a P.G.A.P.C.B., or Pre-
Gower and Pre-Chaucer Brotherhood, for the restoration
of the ancient English style of spelling, and the weeding
out from all libraries, public and private, of those and all
later pretenders, particularly a person of loose character
198 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
named Shakespeare. It having been suggested, however,
that this happy idea could scarcely be considered complete
while the art of printing was permitted to remain unmo-
lested, another society, under the name of the Pre-Lauren-
tius Brotherhood, has been established in connection with it,
for the abolition of all but manuscript books. These Mr.
Pugin has engaged to supply, in characters that nobody on
earth shall be able to read. And it is confidently expected
by those who have seen the House of Lords, that he will
faithfully redeem his pledge.
In Music, a retrogressive step, in which there is much
hope, has been taken. The P.A.B., or Pre-Agincourt
Brotherhood has arisen, nobly devoted to consign to ob-
livion Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and every other such
ridiculous reputation, and to fix its Millennium (as
its name implies) before the date of the first regular musical
composition known to have been achieved in England. As
this Institution has not yet commenced active operations, it
remains to be seen whether the Royal Academy of Music
will be a worthy sister of the Royal Academy of Art, and
admit this enterprising body to its orchestra. We have it on
the best authority, that its compositions will be quite as
rough as the real old original — that it will be, in a word,
exactly suited to the pictorial Art we have endeavoured to
describe. We have strong hopes, therefore, that the Royal
Academy of Music, not wanting an example, may not want
courage.
The regulation of social matters, as separated from the
Fine Arts, has been undertaken by the Pre-Henry-the-
Seventh Brotherhood, who date from the same period as the
Pre-Raphael Brotherhood. This Society, as cancelling all
the advances of nearly four hundred years, and reverting to
one of the most disagreeable periods of English History,
when the Nation was yet very slowly emerging from bar-
barism, and when gentle female foreigners, come over to be
the wives of ^Scottish Kings, wept bitterly (as well they
might) at being left alone among the savage Court, must
be regarded with peculiar favour. As the time of ugly
religious caricatures' (called mysteries), it is thoroughly
THE SUXDAY SCREW 199
Pre-Raphael in its spirit; and may be deemed the twin
brother to that great society. We should be certain of the
Plague among many other advantages, if this Brotherhood
were properly encouraged.
All these Brotherhoods, and ap.y other society of the like
kind, now in being or yet to be, have at once a guiding star,
and a reduction of their great ideas to something palpable
and obvious to the senses, in the sign to which we take the
liberty of directing their attention. We understand that it
is in the contemplation of each Society to become possessed,
with all convenient speed, of a collection of such pictures ;
and that once, every year, to wit, upon the first of April,
the whole intend to amalgamate in a high festival, to be
called the Convocation of Eternal Boobies.
THE SUNDAY SCREW
[JUNE 22, 1850]
THIS little instrument, remarkable for its curious twist, has
been at work again. A small portion of the collective wis-
dom of the nation has affirmed the principle that there must
be no collection or delivery of posted letters on a Sunday.
The principle was discussed by something less than a fourth
of the House of Commons, and affirmed by something less
than a seventh.
Having no doubt whatever that this brilliant victory is, in
effect, the affirmation of the principle that there ought to be
No Anything but churches and chapels on a Sunday; or,
that it is the beginning of a Sabbatarian Crusade, outra-
geous to the spirit of Christianity, irreconcilable with the
health, the rational enjoyments, and the true religious feel-
ing, of the community; and certain to result, if successful,
in a violent reaction, threatening contempt and hatred of
that seventh day which it is a great religious and social ob-
ject to maintain in the popular affection; it would ill become
us to be deterred from speaking out upon the subject, by
200 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
any fear of being misunderstood, or by any certainty of
being misrepresented.
Confident in the sense of the country, and not unac-
quainted with the habits and exigencies of the people, we
approach the Sunday question, quite undiscomposed by the
late storm of mad misstatement and all uncharitableness,
which cleared the way for Lord Ashley's motion. The
preparation may be likened to that which is usually de-
scribed in the case of the Egyptian Sorcerer and the boy
who has some dark liquid poured into the palm of his hand,
which is presently to become a magic mirror. 'Look for
Lord Ashley. What do you see?' 'Oh, here's some one
with a broom!' 'Well! what is he doing?' 'Oh, he 's sweep-
ing away Mr. Rowland Hill! Now, there is a great crowd
of people all sweeping Mr. Rowland Hill away; and now,
there is a red flag with Intolerance on it; and now, they are
pitching a great many Tents called Meetings. Now, the
tents are all upset, and Mr. Rowland Hill has swept every-
body else away. And oh ! now, here 's Lord Ashley, with a
Resolution in his hand !'
One Christian sentence is all-sufficient with us, on the the-
ological part of this subject. 'The Sabbath was made for
man, and not man for the Sabbath.' No amount of signa-
tures by petitions can ever sign away the meaning of those
words; no end of volumes of Hansard's Parliamentary De-
bates can ever affect them in the least. Move and carry
resolutions, bring in bills, have committees, upstairs, down-
stairs, and in my lady's chamber; read a first time, read a
second time, read a third time, read thirty thousand times ;
the declared authority of the Christian dispensation over the
letter of the Jewish Law, particularly in this especial in-
stance, cannot be petitioned, resolved, read, or committee'd
away.
It is important in such a case as this affirmation of a
principle, to know what amount of practical sense and logic
entered into its assertion. We will inquire.
Lord Ashley (who has done much good, and whom we
mention with every sentiment of sincere respect, though we
believe him to be most mischievously deluded on this ques-
THE SUNDAY SCREW 201
tion), speaks of the people employed in the Country Post-
Offices on Sunday, as though they were continually at work,
all the livelong day. He asks whether they are to be 'a
Pariah race, excluded from the enjoyments of the rest of
the community?' He presents to our mind's eye, rows of
Post-Office clerks, sitting, with dishevelled hair and dirty
linen, behind small shutters, all Sunday long, keeping time
with their sighs to the ringing of the church bells, and
watering bushels of letters, incessantly passing through their
hands, with their tears. Is this exactly the reality? The
Upas tree is a figure of speech almost as ancient as our
lachrymose friend the Pariah, in whom most of us recognise
a respectable old acquaintance. Supposing we were to take
it into our heads to declare in these Household Words, that
every Post-Office clerk employed on Sunday in the country,
is compelled to sit under his own particular sprig of Upas,
planted in a flower-pot beside him for the express purpose of
blighting him with its baneful shade, should we be much
more beyond the mark than Lord Ashley himself? Did any
of our readers ever happen to post letters in the Country on
a Sunday? Did they ever see a notice outside a provincial
Post-Office, to the effect that the presiding Pariah would be
in attendance at such an hour on Sunday, and not before?
Did they ever wait for the Pariah, at some inconvenience,
until the hour arrived, and observe him to come to the office
in an extremely spruce condition as to his shirt collar, and do
a little sprinkling of business in a very easy off-hand man-
ner? We have such recollections ourselves. We have posted
and received letters in most parts of this kingdom on a
Sunday, and we never yet observed the Pariah to be quite
crushed. On the contrary, we have seen him at church,
apparently in the best health and spirits (notwithstand-
ing an hour or so of sorting, earlier in the morning), and
we have met him out a-walking with the young lady to whom
he is engaged, and we have known him meet her again with
her cousin, after the dispatch of the Mails, and really con-
duct himself as if he were not particularly exhausted or
afflicted. Indeed, how could he be so, on Lord Ashley's own
showing? There is a Saturday before the Sunday. We are
202 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
a people indisposed, he says, to business on a Sunday. More
than a million of people are known, from their petitions, to
be too scrupulous to hear of such a thing. Few counting-
houses or offices are ever opened on a Sunday. The Mer-
chants and Bankers write by Saturday night's post. The
Sunday night's post may be presumed to be chiefly limited
to letters of necessity and emergency. Lord Ashley's whole
case would break down, if it were probable that the Post-
Office Pariah had half as much confinement on Sunday, as
the He-Pariah who opens my Lord's street door when any-
body knocks, or the She-Pariah who nurses my Lady's baby.
If the London Post-Office be not opened on a Sunday,
says Lord Ashley, why should the Post-Offices of provincial
towns be opened on a Sunday? Precisely because the pro-
vincial towns are NOT London, we apprehend. Because
London is the great capital, mart, and business-centre of
the world; because in London there are hundreds of thou-
sands of people, young and old, away from their families and
friends; because the stoppage of the Monday's Post De-
livery in London would stop, for many precious hours, the
natural flow of the blood from every vein and artery in the
world to the heart of the world, and its return from the
heart through all those tributary channels. Because the
broad difference between London and every other place in
England, necessitated this distinction, and has perpetuated it.
But, to say nothing of petitioners elsewhere, it seems that
two hundred merchants and bankers in Liverpool, 'formed
themselves into a committee, to forward the object of this
motion.' In the name of all the Pharisees of Jerusalem,
could not the two hundred merchants and bankers form them-
selves into a committee to write or read no business-letters
themselves on a Sunday — and let the Post-Office alone? The
Government establishes a monopoly in the Post-Office, and
makes it not only difficult and expensive for me to send a
letter by any other means, but illegal. What right has any
merchant or banker to stop the course of any letter that I
may have sore necessity to post, or may choose to post? If
any one of the two hundred merchants and bankers lay at the
point of dea*h, on Sunday, would he desire his absent child
THE SUNDAY SCREW 203
to be written to — the Sunday Post being yet in existence?
And how do they take upon themselves to tell us that the
Sunday Post is not a Necessity,' when they know, every
man of them, every Sunday morning, that before the clock
strikes next, they and theirs may be visited by any one of
incalculable millions of accidents, to make it a dire need?
Not a necessity? Is it possible that these merchants and
bankers suppose there is any Sunday Post, from any large
town, which is not a very agony of necessity to some one?
I might as well say, in my pride of strength, that a knowl-
edge of bone-setting in surgeons is not a necessity, because
I have not broken my leg.
There is a Sage of this sort in the House of Commons.
He is of opinion that the Sunday Police is a necessity, but
the Sunday Post is not. That is to say, in a certain house
in London or Westminster, there are certain silver spoons,
engraved with the family crest — a Bigot rampant — which
would be pretty sure to disappear, on an early Sunday, if
there were no Policemen on duty; whereas the Sage sees no
present probability of his requiring to write a letter into
the country on a Saturday night — and, if it should arise, he
can use the Electric Telegraph. Such is the sordid balance
some professing Heathens hold of their own pounds against
other men's pennies, and their own selfish wants against those
of the community at large ! Even the Member for Birming-
ham, of all the towns in England, is afflicted by this selfish
blindness, and, because he is 'tired of reading and answering
letters on a Sunday,' cannot conceive the possibility of there
being other people not so situated, to whom the Sunday Post
may, under many circumstances, be an unspeakable blessing.
The inconsequential nature of Lord Ashley's positions, can-
not be better shown, than by one brief passage from his
speech. 'When he said the transmission of the Mail, he
meant the Mail-bags ; he did not propose to interfere with the
passengers.' No? Think again, Lord Ashley.
When the Honourable Member for Whitened Sepulchres
moves his resolution for the stoppage of Mail Trains — in a
word, of all Railway travelling — on Sunday ; and when that
Honourable Gentleman talks about the Pariah clerks who
204 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
take the money and give the tickets, the Pariah engine-drivers,
the Pariah stokers, the Pariah porters, the Pariah police
along the line, and the Pariah flys waiting at the Pariah
stations to take the Pariah passengers, to be attended by
Pariah servants at the Pariah Arms and other Pariah Ho-
tels; what will Lord Ashley do then? Envy insinuated that
Tom Thumb made his giants first, and then killed them, but
you cannot do the like by your Pariahs. You cannot get
an exclusive patent for the manufacture and destruction of
Pariah dolls. Other Honourable Gentlemen are certain to
engage in the trade; and when the Honourable Member for
Whitened Sepulchres makes his Pariahs of all these people,
you cannot refuse to recognise them as being of the genuine
sort, Lord Ashley. Railway and all other Sunday Travel-
ling, suppressed, by the Honourable Member for Whitened
Sepulchres, the same honourable gentleman, who will not have
been particularly complimented in the course of that achieve-
ment by the Times Newspaper, will discover that a good
deal is done towards the Times of Monday, on a Sunday
night, and will Pariah the whole of that immense establish-
ment. For, this is the great inconvenience of Pariah-mak-
ing, that when you begin, they spring up like mushrooms:
insomuch, that it is very doubtful whether we shall have a
house in all this land, from the Queen's Palace downward,
which will not be found, on inspection, to be swarming with
Pariahs. Not touch the Mails, and yet abolish the Mail-
bags? Stop all those silent messengers of affection and
anxiety, yet let the talking traveller, who is the cause of
infinitely more employment, go? Why, this were to sup-
pose all men Fools, and the Honourable Member for Whit-
ened Sepulchres even a greater Noodle than he is !
Lord Ashley supports his motion by reading some perilous
bombast, said to be written by a working-man — of whom the
intelligent body of working-men have no great reason, to our
thinking, to be proud — in which there is much about not
being robbed of the boon of the day of rest; but, with all
Lord Ashley's indisputably humane and benevolent impulses,
we grieve to say we know no robber, whom the working-
man, really desirous to preserve his Sunday, has so much
THE SUNDAY SCREW 205
to dread, as Lord Ashley himself. He is weakly lending the
influence of his good intentions to a movement which would
make that day no day of rest — rest to those who are over-
wrought, includes recreation, fresh air, change — but a day
of mortification and gloom. And this not to one class only,
be it understood. This is not a class question. If there
be no gentleman of spirit in the House of Commons to re-
mind Lord Ashley that the high-flown nonsense he quoted,
concerning labour, is but another form of the stupidest social-
ist dogma, which seeks to represent that there is only one class
of labourers on earth, it is well that the truth should be
stated somewhere. And it is indisputable, that three-fourths
of us are labourers who work hard for our living; and that
the condition of what we call the working-man, has its
parallel, at a remove of certain degrees, in almost all pro-
fessions and pursuits. Running through the middle classes,
is a broad deep vein of constant, compulsory, indispensable
work. There are innumerable gentlemen, and sons and
daughters of gentlemen, constantly at work, who have no
more hope of making fortunes in their vocation, than the
working-man has in his. There are innumerable families in
which the day of rest is the only day out of the seven where
innocent domestic recreations and enjoyments are very feasi-
ble. In our mean gentility, which is the cause of so much
social mischief, we may try to separate ourselves, as to this
question, from the working-man ; and may very complacently
resolve that there is no occasion for his excursion trains and
tea gardens, because we don't use them ; but we had better
not deceive ourselves. It is impossible that we can cramp
his means of needful recreation and refreshment, without
cramping our own, or basely cheating him. We cannot
leave him to the Christian patronage of the Honourable
Member for Whitened Sepulchres, and take ourselves off.
We cannot restrain him and leave ourselves free. Our Sun-
day wants are pretty much the same as his, though his are
far more easily satisfied ; our inclinations and our feelings
are pretty much the same ; and it will be no less wise than
honest in us, the middle classes, not to be Janus-faced about
the matter.
206 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
What is it that the Honourable Member for Whitened
Sepulchres, for whom Lord Ashley clears the way, wants to
do? He sees on a Sunday morning, in the large towns of
England, when the bells are ringing for church and chapel,
certain unwashed, dim-eyed, dissipated loungers, hanging
about the doors of public-houses, and loitering at the street
corners, to whom the day of rest appeals in much the same
degree as a sunny summer day does to so many pigs. Does
he believe that any weight of handcuffs on the Post-Office,
or any amount of restriction imposed on decent people, will
bring Sunday home to these? Let him go, any Sunday
morning, from the new town of Edinburgh where the sound
of a piano would be profanation, to the old Town, and see
what Sunday is in the Canongate. Or let him get up some
statistics of the drunken people in Glasgow, while the
churches are full — and work out the amount of Sabbath
observance which is carried downward, by rigid shows and
Bad-coloured forms.
But, there is another class of people, those who take little
jaunts, and mingle in social little assemblages, on a Sunday,
concerning whom the whole constituency of Whitened Sep-
ulchres, with their Honourable Member in the chair, find
their lank hair standing on end with horror, and pointing,
as if they were all electrified, straight up to the skylights of
Exeter Hall. In reference to this class, we would whisper
in the ears of the disturbed assemblage, three short words,
*Let well alone !'
The English people have long been remarkable for their
domestic habits, and their household virtues and affections.
They are, now, beginning to be universally respected by intel-
ligent foreigners who visit this country, for their unobtru-
sive politeness, their good-humour, and their cheerful recog-
nition of all restraints that really originate in consideration
for the general good. They deserve this testimony (which
we have often heard, of late, with pride) most honourably.
Long maligned and mistrusted, they proved their case
from the very first moment of having it in their power to do
«o; and have never, on any single occasion within our
knowledge, abused any public confidence that has been re-
THE SUNDAY SCREW 207
posed in them. It is an extraordinary thing to know of a
people, systematically excluded from galleries and museums
for years, that their respect for such places, and for them-
selves as visitors to them, dates, without any period of
transition, from the very day when their doors were freely
opened. The national vices are surprisingly few. The
people in general are not gluttons, nor drunkards, nor gam-
blers, nor addicted to cruel sports, nor to the pushing of any
amusement to furious and wild extremes. They are mod-
erate, and easily pleased, and very sensible to all affectionate
influences. Any knot of holiday-makers, without a large
proportion of women and children among them, would be a
perfect phenomenon. Let us go into any place of Sunday
enjoyment where any fair representation of the people re-
sort, and we shall find them decent, orderly, quiet, sociable
among their families and neighbours. There is a general
feeling of respect for religion, and for religious observances.
The churches and chapels are well filled. Very few people
who keep servants or apprentices leave out of consideration
their opportunities of attending church or chapel; the gen-
eral demeanour within those edifices, is particularly grave
and decorous; and the general recreations without, are of a
harmless and simple kind. Lord Brougham never did Henry
Brougham more justice, than in declaring to the House of
Lords, after the success of this motion in the House of Com-
mons, that there is no country where the Sabbath is, on the
whole, better observed than in England. Let the constit-
uency of Whitened Sepulchres ponder, in a Christian spirit,
on these things ; take care of their own consciences ; leave
their Honourable Member to take care of his ; and let well
alone.
For, it is in nations as in families. Too tight a hand in
these respects, is certain to engender a disposition to break
loose, and to run riot. If the private experience of any
reader, pausing on this sentence, cannot furnish many un-
happy illustrations of its truth, it is a very fortunate expe-
rience indeed. Our most notable public example of it, in
England, is just two hundred years old.
Lord Ashley had better merge his Pariahs into the body
208 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
politic; and the Honourable Member for Whitened Sepul-
chres had better accustom his jaundiced eyes to the Sunday
sight of dwellers in towns, roaming in green fields, and gaz-
ing upon country prospects. If he will look a little beyond
them, and lift up the eyes of his mind, perhaps he may ob-
serve a mild, majestic figure in the distance, going through
a field of corn, attended by some common men who pluck
the grain as they pass along, and whom their Divine Master
teaches that he is the Lord, even of the Sabbath-Day.
LIVELY TURTLE
[OCTOBEE 26, 1850]
I HAVE a comfortable property. What I spend, I spend
upon myself; and what I don't spend I save. Those are
my principles. I am warmly attached to my principles, and
stick to them on all occasions.
I am not, as some people have represented, a mean man.
I never denied myself anything that I thought I should like
to have. I may have said to myself 'Snoady' — that is my
name — 'you will get those peaches cheaper if you wait till
next week'; or, I may have said to myself, 'Snoady, you
will get that wine for nothing, if you wait till you are
asked out to dine' ; but I never deny myself anything. If I
can't get what I want without buying it, and paying its
price for it, I do buy it and pay its price for it. I have an
appetite bestowed upon me ; and, if I baulked it, I should con-
sider that I was flying in the face of Providence.
I have no near relation but a brother. If he wants any-
thing of me, he don't get it. All men are my brothers ; and
I see no reason why I should make his, an exceptional case.
I live at a cathedral town where there is an old corporation.
I am not in the Church, but it may be that I hold a little
place of some sort. Never mind. It may be profitable.
Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It may, or it may not, be a sin-
ecure. I don't choose to say. I never enlightened my
brother on these subjects, and I consider all men my brothers.
LIVELY TURTLE 209
The Negro is a man and a brother — should I hold myself
accountable for my position in life, to him? Certainly not.
I often run up to London. I like London. The way I
look at it, is this. London is not a cheap place, but, on the
whole, you can get more of ther real thing for your money
there — I mean the best thing, whatever it is — than you can
get in most places. Therefore, I say to the man who has
got the money, and wants the thing, 'Go to London for it,
and treat yourself.'
When / go, I do it in this manner. I go to Mrs. Skim's
Private Hotel and Commercial Lodging House, near Al-
dersgate Street, City, (it is advertised in Bradshaw's Rail-
way Guide, where I first found it), and there I pay, 'for bed
and breakfast, with meat, two and ninepence per day,
including servants.' Now, I have made a calculation, and
I am satisfied that Mrs. Skim cannot possibly make much
profit out of me. In fact, if all her patrons were lilce me,
my opinion is, the woman would be in the Gazette next month.
Why do I go to Mrs. Skim's when I could go to the Clar-
endon, you may ask? Let us argue that point. If I went
to the Clarendon I could get nothing in bed but sleep ; could
I? No. Now, sleep at the Clarendon is an expensive ar-
ticle ; whereas sleep, at Mrs. Skim's, is decidedly cheap. I
have made a calculation, and I don't hesitate to say, all
things considered, that it 's cheap. Is it an inferior article,
as compared with the Clarendon sleep, or is it of the same
quality ? I am a heavy sleeper, and it is of the same quality.
Then why should I go to the Clarendon?
But as to breakfast? you may say. — Very well. As to
breakfast. I could get a variety of delicacies for breakfast
at the Clarendon, that are out of the question at Mrs. Skim's.
Granted. But I don't want to have them! My opinion is,
that we are not entirely animal and sensual. Man has an
intellect bestowed upon him. If he clogs that intellect by
too good a breakfast, how can he properly exert that intel-
lect in meditation, during the day, upon his dinner? That 's
the point. We are not to enchain the soul. We are to let
it soar. It is expected of us.
At Mrs. Skim's, I get enough for breakfast (there is no
limitation to the bread and butter, though there is to the
meat) and not too much. I have all my faculties about me,
to concentrate upon the object I have mentioned, and I can
say to myself besides, 'Snoady, you have saved six, eight, ten,
fifteen, shillings, already to-day. If there is anything you
fancy for your dinner, have it. Snoady, you have earned
your reward.'
My objection to London, is, that it is the headquarters of
the worst radical sentiments that are broached in England.
I consider that it has a great many dangerous people in it.
I consider the present publication (if it 's Household Words)
very dangerous, and I write this with the view of neutralising
some of its bad effects. My political creed is, let us be com-
fortable. We are all very comfortable as we are — / am very
comfortable as I am — leave us alone !
All mankind are my brothers, and I don't think it Chris-
tian— if you come to that — to tell my brother that he is ig-
norant, or degraded, or dirty, or anything of the kind. I
think it's abusive and low. You meet me with the observa-
tion that I am required to love my brother. I reply, 'I do.'
I am sure I am always willing to say to my brother, 'My
good fellow, I love you very much ; go along with you ; keep
to your own road ; leave me to mine ; whatever is, is right ;
whatever isn't, is wrong; don't make a disturbance!' It
seems to me, that this is at once the whole duty of man, and
the only temper to go to dinner in.
Going to dinner in this temper in the City of London, one
day not long ago, after a bed at Mrs. Skim's, with meat-
breakfast and servants included, I was reminded of the ob-
servation which, if my memory does not deceive me, was
formerly made by somebody on some occasion, that man may
learn wisdom from the lower animals. It is a beautiful fact,
in my opinion, that great wisdom is to be learnt from that
noble animal the Turtle.
I had made up my mind, in the course of the day I speak
of, to have a Turtle dinner. I mean a dinner mainly com-
posed of Turtle. Just a comfortable tureen of soup, with
a pint of punch; and nothing solid to follow, but a tender
juicy steak. I like a tender juicy steak. I generally say
LIVELY TURTLE 211
to myself when I order one, 'Snoady, you have done right.'
When I make up my mind to have a delicacy, expense is
no consideration. The question resolves itself, then, into a
question of the very best. I went to a friend of mine who is
a Member of the Common Council, and with that friend I
held the following conversation.
Said I to him, 'Mr. Groggles, the best Turtle is where?'
Says he, 'If you want a basin for lunch, my opinion is,
you can't do better than drop into Birch's.'
Said I, 'Mr. Groggles, I thought you had known me better,
than to suppose me capable of a basin. My intention is to
dine. A tureen.'
Says Mr. Groggles, without a moment's consideration, and
in a determined voice, 'Right opposite the India House,
Leadenhall Street.'
We parted. My mind was not inactive during the day,
and at six in the afternoon I repaired to the house of Mr.
Groggles's recommendation. At the end of the passage,
leading from the street into the coffee-room, I observed a vast
and solid chest, in which I then supposed that a Turtle of
unusual size might be deposited. But, the correspondence
between its bulk and that of the charge made for my dinner,
afterwards satisfied me that it must be the till of the estab-
lishment.
I stated to the waiter what had brought me there, and I
mentioned Mr. Groggles's name. He feelingly repeated
after me, 'A tureen of Turtle, and a tender juicy steak.'
His manner, added to the manner of Mr. Groggles in the
morning, satisfied me that all was well. The atmosphere of
the coffee-room was odoriferous with Turtle, and the steams
of thousands of gallons, consumed within its walls, hung, in
B&voury grease, upon their surface. I could have inscribed
my name with a penknife, if I had been so disposed, in the
essence of innumerable Turtles. I preferred to fall into a
hungry reverie, brought on by the warm breath of the place,
and to think of the West Indies and the Island of Ascension.
My dinner came — and went. I will draw a veil over the
meal, I will put the cover on the empty tureen, and merely
say that it was wonderful — and that I paid for it.
212 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I sat meditating, when all was over, on the imperfect
nature of our present existence, in which we can eat only for
a limited time, when the waiter roused me with these words.
Said he to me, as he brushed the crumbs off the table,
'Would you like to see the Turtle, Sir?'
'To see what Turtle, waiter?' said I (calmly) to him.
'The tanks of Turtle below, Sir,' said he to me.
Tanks of Turtle ! Good Gracious ! 'Yes !'
The waiter lighted a candle, and conducted me downstairs
to a range of vaulted apartments, cleanly whitewashed and
illuminated with gas, where I saw a sight of the most aston-
ishing and gratifying description, illustrative of the great-
ness of my native country. 'Snoady,' was my first observa-
tion to myself, 'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves !'
There were two or three hundred Turtle in the vaulted
apartments — all alive. Some in tanks, and some taking the
air in long dry walks littered down with straw. They were
of all sizes ; many of them enormous. Some of the enormous
ones had entangled themselves with the smaller ones, and
pushed and squeezed themselves into corners, with their fins
over water-pipes, and their heads downwards, where they
were apoplectically struggling and splashing, apparently in
the last extremity. Others were calm at the bottom of the
tanks; others languidly rising to the surface. The Turtle
in the walks littered down with straw, were calm and motion-
less. It was a thrilling sight. I admire such a sight. It
rouses my imagination. If you wish to try its effect on
yours, make a call right opposite the India House any day
you please — dine — pay — and ask to be taken below.
Two athletic young men, without coats, and with the
sleeves of their shirts tucked up to the shoulders, were in
attendance on these noble animals. One of them, wrestling
with the most enormous Turtle in company, and dragging
him up to the edge of the tank, for me to look at, presented
an idea to me which I never had before. I ought to observe
that I like an idea. I say, when I get a new one, 'Snoady,
hook that P
My idea, on the present occasion, was,— Mr. Grooves!
It was not a Turtle that I saw, but Mr. Groggles. ft was
LIVELY TURTLE 213
the dead image of Mr. Groggles. He was dragged up to
confront me, with his waistcoat — if I may be allowed the ex-
pression— towards me; and it was identically the waistcoat
of Mr. Groggles. It was the same shape, very nearly the
same colour, only wanted a gold watch-chain and a bunch of
seals, to BE the waistcoat of Mr. Groggles. There was what
I should call a bursting expression about him in general,
which was accurately the expression of Mr. Groggles. I
had never closely observed a Turtle's throat before. The
folds of his loose cravat, I found to be precisely those of Mr.
Groggle's cravat. Even the intelligent eye — I mean to say,
intelligent enough for a person of correct principles, and
not dangerously so — was the eye of Mr. Groggles. When
the athletic young man let him go, and, with a roll of his
head, he flopped heavily down into the tank, it was exactly the
manner of Mr. Groggles as I have seen him ooze away into his
seat, after opposing a sanitary motion in the Court of Com-
mon Council !
'Snoady,' I couldn't help saying to myself 'you have done
it. You have got an idea, Snoady, in which a great prin-
ciple is involved. I congratulate you !' I followed the young
man, who dragged up several Turtle to the brinks of the va-
rious tanks. I found them all the same — all varieties of Mr.
Groggles — all extraordinarily like the gentlemen who usually
eat them. 'Now, Snoady,' was my next remark, 'what do
you deduce from this?'
'Sir,' said I, 'what I deduce from this, is, confusion to those
Radicals and other Revolutionists who talk about improve-
ment. Sir,' said I, 'what I deduce from this, is, that there
isn't this resemblance between the Turtles and the Groggleses
for nothing. It 's meant to show mankind that the proper
model for a Groggles, is a Turtle ; and that the liveliness we
want in a Groggles, is the liveliness of a Turtle, and no
more.' 'Snoady,' was my reply to this, 'You have hit it.
You are right !'
I admired the idea very much, because, if I hate anything
in the world, it 's change. Change has evidently no business
in the world, has nothing to do with it, and isn't intended.
What we want is (as I think I have mentioned) to be com-
fortable. I look at it that way. Let us be comfortable, and
leave us alone. Now, when the young man dragged a Grog-
gles—I mean a Turtle— out of his tank, this was exactly
what the noble animal expressed as he floundered back again.
I have several friends besides Mr. Groggles in the Common
Council, and it might be a week after this, when I said,
'Snoady, if I was you, I would go to that court, and hear
the debate to-day.' I went. A good deal of it was what I
call a sound, old English discussion. One eloquent speaker
objected to the French as wearing wooden shoes ; and a
friend of his reminded him of another objection to that for-
eign people, namely, that they eat frogs. I had feared, for
many years, I am sorry to say, that these wholesale prin-
ciples were gone out. How delightful to find them still re-
maining among the great men of the City of London, in the
year one thousand eight hundred and fifty! It made me
think of the Lively Turtle.
But, I soon thought more of the Lively Turtle. Some
Radicals and Revolutionists have penetrated even to the Com-
mon Council — -which otherwise I regard as one of the last
strongholds of our afflicted constitution; and speeches were
made, about removing Smithfield Market — which I consider
to be a part of that Constitution — and about appointing a
Medical Officer for the City, and about preserving the public
health; and other treasonable practices, opposed to Church
and State. These proposals Mr. Groggles, as might have
been expected of such a man, resisted; so warmly, that, as I
afterwards understood from Mrs. Groggles, he had rather
a sharp attack of blood to the head that night. All the
Groggles party resisted them too, and it was a fine consti-
tutional sight to see waistcoat after waistcoat rise up in re-
sistance of them and subside. But what struck me in the
sight was this, 'Snoady,' said I, 'here is your idea carried out,
Sir! These Radicals and Revolutionists are the athletic
young- men in shirt sleeves, dragging the Lively Turtle to
the edges of the tank. The Groggleses are the Turtle, look-
ing out for a moment, and flopping down again. Honour
to the Groggleses ! Honour to the Court of Lively Turtle !
The wisdom of the Turtle is the hope of England !'
THE AFFAIRS OF MR. JOHN BULL 215
There are three heads in the moral of what I had to say.
First, Turtle and Groggles are identical; wonderfully alike
externally, wonderfully alike mentally. Secondly, Turtle is
a good thing every way, and the liveliness of the Turtle is
intended as an example for the liveliness of man ; you are not
to go beyond that. Thirdly, we are all quite comfortable.
Leave us alone !
A CRISIS IN THE AFFAIRS OF
MR. JOHN BULL
AS RELATED BY MRS. BULL TO THE CHILDREN1
[NOVEMBER 23, 1850]
MRS. BULL, and her rising family were seated round the fire,
one November evening at dusk, when all was mud, mist, and
darkness, out of doors, and a good deal of fog had even got
into the family parlour. To say the truth, the parlour was
on no occasion fog-proof, and had, at divers notable times,
been so misty as to cause the whole Bull family to grope
about, in a most confused manner, and make the strangest
mistakes. But, there was an excellent ventilator over the
family fireplace (not one of Dr. Arnott's, though it was of
the same class, being an excellent invention, called Common
Sense), and hence, though the fog was apt to get into the
parlour through a variety of chinks, it soon got out again,
and left the Bulls at liberty to see what o'clock it was, by the
solid, steady-going, family time-piece: which went remark-
ably well in the long run, though it was apt, at times, to be
a trifle too slow.
Mr. Bull was dozing in his easy-chair, with his pocket-
handkerchief drawn over his head. Mrs. Bull, always in-
dustrious, was hard at work, knitting. The children were
i Readers will easily detect the reference to the 'No Poperv' contro-
versies of 1850, to Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Pusey, and other theologians
of the time. Dickens's antipathy to anything Roman is well known,
and may be illustrated in abundance from the Child's History of Eng-
land.
216 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
grouped in various attitudes around the blazing fire. Master
C. J. London (called after his Godfather), who had been
rather late at his exercise, sat with his chin resting, in some-
thing of a thoughtful and penitential manner, on his slate,
and his slate resting on his knees. Young Jonathan — a
cousin of the little Bulls, and a noisy, overgrown lad — was
making a tremendous uproar across the yard, with a new
plaything. Occasionally, when his noise reached the ears
of Mr. Bull, the good gentleman moved impatiently in his
chair, and muttered 'Con — found that boy in the stripes, I
wish he wouldn't make such a fool of himself !'
'He '11 quarrel with his new toy soon, I know,' observed the
discreet Mrs. Bull, 'and then he '11 begin to knock it about.
But we mustn't expect to find old heads on young shoulders.'
'That can't be, Ma,' said Master C. J. London, who was a
sleek, shining-faced boy.
'And why, then, did you expect to find an old head on
Young England's shoulders?' retorted Mrs. Bull, turning
quickly on him.
'I didn't expect to find an old head on Young England's
shoulders !' cried Master C. J. London, putting his left-hand
knuckles to his right eye.
'You didn't expect it, you naughty boy?' said Mrs. Bull.
'No !' whimpered Master C. J. London. 'I am sure I never
did. Oh, oh, oh !'
'Don't go on in that way, don't !' said Mrs. Bull, 'but be-
have better in future. What did you mean by playing
with Young England at all?'
'I didn't mean any harm !' cried Master C. J. London, ap-
plying, in his increased distress, the knuckles of his right
hand to his right eye, and the knuckles of his left hand to his
left eye.
'I dare say you didn't!' returned Mrs. Bull. 'Hadn't you
had warning enough about playing with candles and candle-
sticks? How often had you been told that your poor
father's house, long before you were born, was in danger of
being reduced to ashes by candles and candlesticks? And
when Young England and his companions began to put their
shirts on, over their clothes, and to play all sorts of fan-
THE AFFAIRS OF MR. JOHN BULL 217
tastic tricks in them, why didn't you come and tell your poor
father and me, like a dutiful C. J. London?'
'Because the rubric — ' Master C. J. London was begin-
ning, when Mrs. Bull took him up short.
'Don't talk to me about the Rubric, or you '11 make it
worse !' said Mrs. Bull, shaking her head at him. 'Just ex-
actly what the Rubric meant then, it means now; and just
exactly what it didn't mean then, it don't mean now. You
are taught to act, according to the spirit, not the letter; and
you know what its spirit must be, or you wouldn't be. No,
C. J. London !' said Mrs. Bull, emphatically. 'If there were
any candles or candlesticks in the spirit of your lesson-book,
Master Wiseman would have been my boy, and not you !'
Here, Master C. J. London fell a-crying more grievously
than before, sobbing, 'Oh, Ma, Master Wiseman with his red
legs, your boy ! Oh, oh, oh !'
'Will you be quiet,' returned Mrs. Bull, 'and let your poor
father rest ? I am ashamed of you. You to go and play with
a parcel of sentimental girls, and dandy boys ! Is that your
bringing up?'
'I didn't know they were fond of Master Wiseman,' pro-
tested Master C. J. London, still crying.
'You didn't know, Sir!' retorted Mrs. Bull. Don't tell
me! Then you ought to have known. Other people knew.
You were told often enough, at the time, what it would come
to. You didn't want a ghost, I suppose, to warn you that
when they got to candlesticks, they 'd get to candles ; and that
when they got to candles, they 'd get to lighting 'em ; and
that when they began to put their shirts on outside, and to
play at monks and friars, it was as natural that Master Wise-
man should be encouraged to put on a pair of red-stockings,
and a red hat, and to commit I don't know what other Tom-
fooleries and make a perfect Guy Fawkes of himself in
more ways than one. Is it because you are a Bull, that you
are not to be roused till they shake scarlet close to your very
eyes?' said Mrs. Bull indignantly,
Master C. J. London, still repeating 'Oh, oh, oh !' in a
very plaintive manner, screwed his knuckles into his eyes
until there appeared considerable danger of his screwing his
218 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
eyes out of his head. But, little John (who though of a
spare figure was a very spirited boy), started up from the
little bench on which he sat; gave Master C. J. London a
hearty pat on the back (accompanied, however, with a slight
poke in the ribs) ; and told him that if Master Wiseman, or
Young England, or any of those fellows, wanted anything
for himself, he (little John) was the boy to give it him.
Hereupon, Mrs. Bull, who was always proud of the child, and
always had been, since his measure was first taken for an en-
tirely new suit of clothes, to wear in Common, could not
refrain from catching him up on her knee and kissing him
with great affection, while the whole family expressed their
delight in various significant ways.
'You are a noble boy, little John,' said Mrs. Bull, with a
mother's pride, 'and that 's the fact, after everything is said
and done !'
*I don't know about that, Ma'; quoth little John, whose
blood was evidently up ; 'but if these chaps and their backers,
the Bulls of Rome — '
Here Mr. Bull, who was only half asleep, kicked out in
such an alarming manner, that for some seconds, his boots
gyrated fitfully all over the family hearth, filling the whole
circle with consternation. For, when Mr. Bull did kick, his
kick was tremendous. And he always kicked, when the Bulls
of Rome were mentioned.
Mrs. Bull, holding up her finger as an injunction to the
children to keep quiet, sagely observed Mr. Bull from the
opposite side of the fireplace, until he calmly dozed again,
when she recalled the scattered family to their former posi-
tions, and spoke in a low tone.
'You must be very careful,' said the worthy lady, 'how you
mention that name; for your poor father has so many un-
pleasant experiences of those Bulls of Rome — Bless the man !
he Ml do somebody a mischief.'
Mr. Bull, lashing out again more violently than before,
upset the fender, knocked down the fire-irons, kicked over the
brass footman, and, whisking his silk handkerchief off his
head, chased the Pussy on the rug clean out of the room into
the passage, and so out of the street-door into the night;
THE AFFAIRS OF MR. JOHN BULL 219
the Pussy having (as was well-known to the children in gen-
eral) originally strayed from the Bulls of Rome into Mr.
Bull's assembled family. After the achievement of this
crowning feat, Mr. Bull came back, and in a highly excited
state performed a sort of war-dance in his top-boots, all over
the parlour. Finally, he sank into his arm-chair, and cov-
ered himself up again.
Master C. J. London, who was by no means sure that Mr.
Bull in his heat would not come down upon him for the late-
ness of his exercise, took refuge behind his slate and behind
little John, who was a perfect gamecock. But, Mr. Bull
having concluded his war-dance without injury to any one,
the boy crept out, with the rest of the family, to the knees
of Mrs. Bull, who thus addressed them, taking little John
into her lap before she began :
'The B.'s of R.,' said Mrs. Bull, getting, by this prudent
device, over the obnoxious words, 'caused your poor father
a world of trouble, before any one of you were born. They
pretended to be related to us, and to have some influence in
our family ; but it can't be allowed for a single moment —
nothing will ever induce your poor father to hear of it; let
them disguise or constrain themselves now and then, as they
will, they are, by nature, an insolent, audacious, oppressive,
intolerable race.'
Here little John doubled his fists, and began squaring at
the Bulls of Rome, as he saw those pretenders with his mind's
eye. Master C. J. London, after some considerable reflec-
tion, made a show of squaring, likewise.
'In the days of your great, great, great, great grand-
father,' said Mrs. Bull, dropping her voice still lower, as she
glanced at Mr. Bull in his repose, 'the Bulls of Rome were
not so utterly hateful to our family as they are at present.
We didn't know them so well, and our family were very ig-
norant and low in the world. But we have gone on advanc-
ing in every generation since then ; and now we are taught
by all our family history and experience, and by the most
limited exercise of our national faculties, That our knowl-
edge, liberty, progress, social welfare and happiness, are
•wholly irreconcilable and inconsistent with them. That the
220 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Bulls of Rome are not only the enemies of our family, but of
the whole human race. That wherever they go, they per-
petuate misery, oppression, darkness, and ignorance. That
they are easily made the tools of the worst of men for the
worst of purposes ; and that they cannot be endured by your
poor father, or by any man, woman, or child, of common
sense, who has the least connection with us.'
Little John, who had gradually left off squaring, looked
hard at his aunt, Miss Eringobragh, Mr. Bull's sister, who
was grovelling on the ground, with her head in the ashes.
This unfortunate lady had been, for a length of time, in a
horrible condition of mind and body, and presented a most
lamentable spectacle of disease, dirt, rags, superstition, and
degradation.
Mrs. Bull, observing the direction of the child's glance,
smoothed little John's hair, and directed her next observations
to him.
'Ah ! You may well look at the poor thing, John !' said
Mrs. Bull ; 'for the Bulls of Rome have had far too much to
do with her present state. There have been many other
causes at work to destroy the strength of her constitution,
but the Bulls of Rome have been at the bottom of it ; and,
depend upon it, wherever you see a condition at all resem-
bling hers, you will find, on inquiry, that the sufferer has
allowed herself to be dealt with by the Bulls of Rome. The
cases of squalor and ignorance, in all the world most like
your aunt's, are to be found in their own household ; on the
steps of their doors ; in the heart of their homes. In Switz-
erland, you may cross a line, no broader than a bridge or a
hedge, and know, in an instant, where the Bulls of Rome
have been received, by the condition of the family. Wher-
ever the Bulls of Rome have the most influence, the family is
sure to be the most abject. Put your trust in those Bulls,
John, and it 's in the inevitable order and sequence of things,
that you must come to be something like your Aunt, sooner
or later.'
*I thought the Bulls of Rome had got into difficulties, and
run away, Ma ?' said little John, looking up into his mother's
face inquiringly.
THE AFFAIRS OF MR. JOHN BULL 221
'Why, so they did get into difficulties, to be sure, John,'
returned Mrs. Bull, 'and so they did run away ; but, even the
Italians, who had got thoroughly used to them, found them
out, and they were obliged to go and hide in a cupboard,
where they still talked big through the key-hole, and pre-
sented one of the most contemptible and ridiculous exhibi-
tions that ever were seen on earth. However, they were
taken out of the cupboard by some friends of theirs — friends,
indeed! who care as much about them as I do for the sea-
serpent ; but who happened, at the moment, to find it neces-
sary to play at soldiers, to amuse their fretful children, who
didn't know what they wanted, and, what was worse, would
have it — and so the Bulls got back to Rome. And at Rome
they are anything but safe to stay, as you '11 find, my dear,
one of these odd mornings.'
'Then, if they are so unsafe, and so found out, Ma,' said
Master C. J. London, 'how come they to interfere with us,
now ?'
'Oh, C. J. London!' returned Mrs. Bull, 'what a sleepy
child you must be, to put such a question ! Don't you know
that the more they are found out, and the weaker they are,
the more important it must be to them to impose upon the
ignorant people near them, by pretending to be closely con-
nected with a person so much looked up to as your poor
father?'
'Why, of course!' cried little John to his brother. 'Oh,
you stupid !'
'And I am ashamed to have to repeat, C. J. London,' said
Mrs. Bull, 'that, but for your friend, Young England, and
the encouragement you gave to that mewling little Pussy,
•when it strayed here — don't say you didn't, you naughty
boy, for you did !' —
'You know you did !' said little John.
Master C. J. London began to cry again.
'Don't do that,' said Mrs. Bull, sharply, 'but be a better
boy in future ! I say, I am ashamed to have to repeat that,
but for that, the Bulls of Rome would never have had the
audacity to call their connection, Master Wiseman, your poor
father's child, and to appoint him, with his red hat and
222 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
stocking*, and his mummery and flummery, to a portion of
your father's estates— though, for the matter of that, there
is nothing to prevent their appointing him to the Moon,
except the difficulty of getting him there ! And so, your poor
father's affairs have been brought to this crisis: that he has
to deal with an insult which is perfectly absurd, and yet which
he must, for the sake of his family, in all time to come, de-
cisively and seriously deal with, in order to detach himself,
once and for ever, from these Bulls of Rome ; and show how
impotent they are. There 's difficulty and vexation, you have
helped to bring upon your father, you bad child.'
'Oh, oh, oh !' cried Master C. J. London. « Oh, I never
went to do it. Oh, oh, oh !'
'Hold your tongue !' said Mrs. Bull, 'and do a good exer-
cise! Now that your father has turned that Pussy out of
doors, go on with your exercise like a man ; and let us have
no more playing with any one connected with those Bulls of
Rome; between whom and you there is a great gulf fixed, as
you ought to have known in the beginning. Take your fin-
gers out of your eyes, Sir, and do your exercise !'
4 — Or I '11 come and pinch you !' said little John.
'John,' said Mrs. Bull, 'you leave him alone. Keep your
eye upon him, and, if you find him relapsing, tell your father.'
'Oh, won't I neither!' cried little John.
'Don't be vulgar,' said Mrs. Bull. 'Now, John, I can trust
you. Whatever you do, I know you won't wake your father
unnecessarily. You are a bold brave child, and I highly ap-
prove of your erecting yourself against Master Wiseman and
all that bad set. But, be wary, John ; and as you have, and
deserve to have, great influence with your father, I am sure
you will be careful how you wake him. If he was to make a
wild rush, and begin to dance about, on the Platform in the
Hall, I don't know where he 'd stop.'
Little John, getting on his legs, began buttoning his jacket
with great firmness and vigour, preparatory to action.
Master C. J. London, with a dejected aspect and an occasional
sob, went on with his exercise.
MR. BULL'S SOMNAMBULIST 223
MR. BULL'S SOMNAMBULIST
AN extremely difficult case of somnambulism, occurring in the
family of that respected gentleman Mr. Bull, and at the
present time developing itself without any mitigation of its
apparently hopeless symptoms, will furnish the subject of the
present paper. Apart from its curious psychological in-
terest, it is worth investigation, as having caused and still
causing Mr. Bull great anxiety of mind when he falls into
low spirits. I may observe, as one of the medical attendants
of the family, that this is not very often the case, all things
considered : Mr. Bull being of a sanguine temperament, good-
natured to a fault, and highly confident in the strength of his
constitution. This confidence, I regret to add, makes him
too frequently neglect himself when there is an urgent neces-
sity for his being careful.
The patient in whom are manifested the distressing sym-
toms of somnambulism I shall describe, is an old woman — •
Mrs. Abigail Dean. The recognised abbreviation of her al-
most obsolete Christian name is used for brevity's sake in
Mr. Bull's family, and she is always known in the House as
Abby Dean.1 By that name I shall call her, therefore, in re-
cording her symptoms.
As if everything about this old woman were destined to be
strange and exceptional, it is remarkable that although Abby
Dean is at the head of the Upper Servants' Hall, and occupies
the post of housekeeper in Mr. Bull's family, nobody has the
least confidence in her, and even Mr. Bull himself has not the
slightest idea how she got into the situation. When pressed
upon the subject, as I have sometimes taken the liberty of
pressing him, he scratches his head, stares, and is unable to
give any other explanation than 'Well ! There she is.
That 's all 7 know !' On these occasions he is so exceedingly
i Earl of Aberdeen, and it will be seen that the whole of this paper
deals with the affairs of his administration and the members of his
ministry.
224
disconcerted and ashamed, that I have forborne to point out
to him the absurdity of his taking her without a character, or
ever having supposed (as I assume he must have supposed)
that such a superannuated person could be worth her wages.
The following extracts from my notes of the case will
describe her in her normal condition: 'Abby Dean. Phleg-
matic temperament. Bilious habit. Circulation, very slug-
gish. Speech, drowsy, indistinct, and confused. Senses,
feeble. Memory, short. Pulse, very languid. A remark-
ably slow goer. At all times a heavy sleeper, and difficult
to awaken. When awakened, peevish. Earlier in life had
fits, and was much contorted — first on one side, and then on
the other.'
It was within a few weeks of her inexplicable appearance at
the head of Mr. Bull's family, that this ancient female fell
into a state of somnambulism. Mr. Bull observed her — I
quote his own words — 'eternally mooning about the House,'
and putting some questions to her, and finding that her replies
were mere gibberish, sent for me. I found her on a bench
in the Upper Servants' Hall, evidently fast asleep (though
her eyelids were open), and breathing stertorously. After
shaking her for some time with Mr. Bull's assistance, I in-
quired, 'Do you know who you are?' She replied, 'Lord!
Abby Dean, to be sure!' I said, 'Do you know where you
are?' She answered, with a sort of fretful defiance, 'At the
head of Mr. Bull's establishment.' I put the question, 'Do
you know what you have to do there?' Her reply was, 'Yes
— nothing.' Mr. Bull then interposed, and informed me, with
some heat, that this was the utmost satisfaction he had been
able to elicit 'from the confounded old woman,' since she first
brought her boxes into the family mansion.
She was smartly blistered, daily, for a considerable time.
Mustard poultices were freely applied; caustic was used as a
counter-irritant ; setons were inserted in her neck ; and she was
trotted about, and poked, and pinched, almost unremittingly,
by certain servants very zealous in their attachment to Mr.
Bull. I regret to state that under this treatment, sharply
continued at intervals from that period to the present, she has
" become worse instead of better. She has now subsided into a
MR. BULL'S SOMNAMBULIST 225
state of constant and confirmed somnambulism, from which
there is no human hope of her recovery.
The case, being one of a comatose nature, is chiefly inter-
esting for its obstinacy. Its phenomena are not generally
attractive to the imagination. Indeed, I am of opinion that
at no period of her invalided career has any moment of bril-
liancy irradiated the lethargic state of this unfortunate
female. Her proceedings are in accordance with those of
most of the dreariest somnambulists of whom we have a re-
liable record. She will get up and dress herself, and go to
Mr. Bull's Treasury, or take her seat on her usual Bench
in the Upper Servants' Hall, avoiding on the way the knock-
ing of her head against walls and doors, but giving no other
sign of intellectual vigour. She will sometimes sit up very
late at night, moaning and muttering, and occasionally rising
on her legs to complain of being attacked by enemies. (The
common delusion that people are conspiring against her, is,
as might naturally be expected, a feature of her disease.)
She will frequently cram into her pockets a large accumula-
tion of Mr. Bull's bills, plans for the improvement of his
estate, and other documents of importance, and will drop the
same without any reason, and refuse to take them up again
when they are offered to her. Other similar papers she will
hide in holes and corners, quickly forgetting what she has
done with them. Sometimes, she will fall to wringing her
hands in the course of her wanderings in the House, and to
declaring that unless she is treated with greater deference she
will 'go out.5 But, it is a curious illustration of the cunning
often mingled with this disorder that she has never stirred an
inch beyond the door; having, evidently, some latent con-
sciousness in the midst of her stupor, that if she once went out,
no earthly consideration would prevail on Mr. Bull to let her
in again.
Her eyes are invariably open in the sleep-waking state, but
their power of vision is much contracted. It has long been
evident to all observers of her melancholy case, that she is
blind to what most people can easily see.
The circumstance which I consider special to the case of
Abby Dean, and greatly augmentive of its alarming character,
226 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I now proceed to mention. Mr. Bull has in his possession
a Cabinet, of modern manufacture and curious workman-
ship, composed of various pieces of various woods, inlaid
and dovetailed with tolerable ingenuity considering their
great differences of grain and growth; but, it must be ad-
mitted, clumsily put together on the whole, and liable, at
any time, to fall to pieces. It contains, however, some ex-
cellent specimens of English timber, that have, in previous
pieces of furniture, been highly serviceable to Mr. Bull:
among which may be mentioned a small though tough and
sound specimen of genuine pollard oak, which Mr. Bull is ac-
customed to point out to his friends by the playful name of
'Johnny.'1 This Cabinet has never been altogether pleasing
to Mr. Bull ; but when it was sent home by the manufacturer,
he consented to make use of it in default of a better. With
a little grumbling he entrusted his choicest possessions to its
safe-keeping, and placed it, in common with the rest of his
worldly goods, under the care of Abby Dean. Now, I am
not at the present moment prepared with a theory of the
means by which this ill-starred female is enabled to exercise
a subtle influence on inert matter; but, it is unquestionably
a fact, known to many thousands of credible persons who
have watched the case, that she has paralysed the whole
Cabinet! Miraculous as it may appear, the Cabinet has de-
rived infection from her somnambulistic guardianship. It
is covered with dust, full of moth, gone to decay, and all but
useless. The hinges are rusty, the locks are stiff, the creak-
ing doors and drawers will neither open nor shut, Mr. Bull
can insinuate nothing into it, and can get nothing out of it
but office paper and red tape — of which article he is in no
need whatever, having a vast supply on hand. Even Johnny
is not distinguishable, in the general shrinking and warping
of its ill-fitted materials ; and I doubt if there ever were such
a rickety piece of furniture beheld in the world !
Mr. Bull's distress of mind is so difficult to separate from
his housekeeper's somnambulism, that I cannot present any-
thing like a popular account of the old woman's disorder,
without frequently naming her unfortunate master. Mr.
1 Lord John Russell.
MR. BULL'S SOMNAMBULIST 227
Bull, then, has fallen into great trouble of late, the growth
of which he finds it difficult to separate from his somnam-
bulist. Thus. One Nick,1 a mortal enemy of Mr. Bull's —
and possessing so much family resemblance to his spiritual
enemy of the same name, that if that Nick be the father of
lies, this Nick is at least the uncle — became extremely over-
bearing and aggressive, and, among other lawless proceed-
ings, seized a Turkey which was kept in a Crescent in Mr.
Bull's neighbourhood. Now, Mr. Bull, sensible that if the
plain rules of right and wrong were once overborne, the se-
curity of his own possessions was at an end, joined the Cres-
cent in demanding that the Turkey should be restored. Not
that he cared particularly about the bird itself, which was
quite unfit for Christmas purposes, but, because Nick's prin-
ciples were of vital importance to his peace. He therefore
instructed Abby Dean to represent, with patience, but with
the utmost resolution and firmness, that there must be no
stealing of Turkeys, or anything else, without punishment ;
and that if this Nick conducted himself in a felonious way,
he (Mr. Bull) would feel constrained to chastise him. What
does the old woman in pursuance of these instructions, but
begin by gabbling in a manner so drowsy, heavy, halting,
and feeble, that the more Nick treats with her, the more per-
suaded he becomes — and naturally too — that Mr. Bull is a
coward, who has no earnestness in him ! Consequently, he
sticks to his wicked intents, which there is a great probability
he might otherwise have abandoned, and Mr. Bull is obliged
to send his beloved children out to fight him.
The family of Mr. Bull is so brave, their nature is so as-
tonishingly firm under difficulties, and they are a race so
unsubduable in the might of their valour, that Mr. Bull can-
not hear of their great exploits against his enemy, without
enthusiastic emotions of pride and pleasure. But, he has a
real tenderness for his children's lives in time of war — un-
happily he is less sensible of the value of life in time of peace
— and the good old man often weeps in private when he thinks
of the gallant blood inexpressibly dear to him, that is shed,
and is yet to be shed, in this cause. An exasperating
i The Emperor of Russia.
228 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
part of Abby Dean's somnambulism is, that at this momen-
tous and painful crisis in Mr. Bull's life, she still
goes on 'mooning about' (I again quote the worthy gen-
tleman's words), in her old heavy way; presenting a con-
trast to the energy of his children, which is so extremely dis-
agreeable, that Mr. Bull, though not a violent man, is some-
times almost goaded into knocking her on the head.
Another feature in this case — which we find to obtain in
other cases of somnambulism in the books — is, that the pa-
tient often becomes confused, touching her own identity.
She is observed to confound herself with those noble children
of Mr. Bull whom I have just mentioned, and to take to her-
self more or less of the soaring reputation of their deeds.
I clearly foresee, on an attentive examination of the latest
symptoms, that this delusion will increase, and that within
a few months she will be found sleepily insinuating to all the
House that she has some real share in the glory those faithful
sons have won. I am of opinion also, that this is a part of
her disease which she will be capable of mysteriously com-
municating to the Cabinet, and that we shall find the whole
of that lumbering piece of furniture, at about the same time,
similarly afflicted.
It is further to be observed, as an incident of this per-
plexed case of sleep-waking, that the patient has sufficient
consciousness to excuse herself from the performance of
every duty she undertook to discharge in entering Mr. Bull's
service, by one unvarying reference to the fight in which his
children are engaged. The House is neglected, the estate
is ill managed, the necessities and complaints of the people
are unheeded, everything is put off and left undone, for this
no-reason. 'Whereas,' as Mr. Bull observes — and there is
no gainsaying it — 'if I be unhappily involved in all this
trouble at a distance, let me at least do some slight good at
home. Let me have some compensating balance, here, for
all my domestic loss and sorrow there. If my precious chil-
dren be slain upon my right hand, let me, for God's sake,
the better teach and nurture those now growing up upon my
left.' But where is the use of saying this, or of saying any-
thing, to a somnambulist? Further still, than this. — Abby,
OUR COMMISSION 229
in her mooning about (for I again quote the words of Mr.
Bull), is frequently overheard to mumble that if anybody
touches her, it will be at the peril of Mr. Bull's brave children
afar off, who will, in that event, suffer some mysterious
damage. Now, although the meanest hind, within or with-
out the House, might know better than to suppose this true
or possible, I grieve to relate that it has a powerful effect in
preventing efforts to awake her ; and that many persons in
the establishment who are capable of administering powerful
shakes or wholesome wringings of the nose are restrained
hereby from offering their salutary aid. I should observe,
as the closing feature of the case, that these mumblings are
echoed in an ominous tone, by the Cabinet ; and I am of opin-
ion, from what I observe, that its echoes will become louder
in about January or February next, if it should hang together
so long.
This is the patient's state. The question to be resolved is,
Can she be awakened ? It is highly important that she should
be, if Science can devise a way ; for, until she can be roused
to some sense of her condition in reference to Mr. Bull and
his affairs, Mr. Bull can by no humane means rid himself of
her. That she should be got into a state to receive warn-
ing, I agree with Mr. Bull in deeming of the highest import-
ance. Although I wish him to avoid undue excitement, I
never can remonstrate with him when he represents to me
(as he does very often) that, in this eventful time what he
requires to have at the head of his establishment, is — em-
phatically, a Man.
OUR COMMISSION
[AUGUST 11, 1855]
THE disclosures in reference to the adulteration of Food,
Drinks, and Drugs, for which the public are indebted to the
vigour and spirit of our contemporary The Lancet, lately
inspired us with the idea of originating a Commission to
inquire into the extensive adulteration of certain other articles
230 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
which it is of the last importance that the country should
possess in a genuine state. Every class of the general public
was included in this large Commission; and the whole of the
analyses, tests, observations, and experiments, were made by
that accomplished practical chemist, Mr. Bull.
The first subject of inquiry was that article of universal
consumption familiarly known in England as 'Government.'
Mr. Bull produced a sample of this commodity, purchased
about the middle of July in the present year, at a wholesale
establishment in Downing Street. The first remark to be
made on the sample before the Commission, Mr. Bull observed,
was its excessive dearness. There was little doubt that the
genuine article could be furnished to the public, at a fairer
profit to the real producers, for about fifty per cent, less than
the cost price of the specimen under consideration. In
quality, the specimen was of an exceedingly poor and
low description; being deficient in flavour, character, clear-
ness, brightness, and almost every other requisite. It was
what would be popularly termed wishy-washy, muddled, and
flat. Mr. Bull pointed out to the Commission, floating on
the top of this sample, a volatile ingredient, which he consid-
ered had no business there. It might be harmless enough,
taken into the system at a debating-society, or after a public
dinner, or a conaic song ; but in its present connection, it was
dangerous. It had not improved with keeping. It had come
into use as a ready means of making froth, but froth was
exact!}- what ought not to be found at the top of this article,
or indeed in any part of it. The sample before the Com-
mission, was frightfully adulterated with immense infusions
of the common weed called Talk Talk, in such combina-
tion, was a rank Poison. He had obtained a precipitate of
Corruption from this purchase. He did not mean metallic
corruption, as deposits of gold, silver, or copper; but, that
species of corruption which, on the proper tests being ap-
plied, turned white into black, and black into white, and like-
wise engendered quantities of parasite vermin. He had tested
the strength of the sample, and found it not nearly up to
the mark. He had detected the presence of a Grey deposit
in one large Department, which produced vacillation and
OUR COMMISSION 231
weakness ; indisposition to action to-day, and action upon
compulsion to-morrow. He considered the sample, on the
whole, decidedly unfit for use. Mr. Bull went on to say, that
he had purchased another specimen of the same commodity
at an opposition establishment over the way, which bore the
sign of the British Lion, and proclaimed itself, with the aid
of a Brass Band, as 'The only genuine and patriotic shop' ;
but, that he had found it equally deleterious ; and that he had
not succeeded in discovering any dealer in the commodity
under consideration who sold it in a genuine or wholesome
state.
The bitter drug called Public Offices, formed the next sub-
ject of inquiry. Mr. Bull produced an immense number of
samples of this drug, obtained from shops in Downing Street,
Whitehall, Palace Yard, the Strand, and elsewhere. Anal-
ysis had detected in every one of them, from seventy-five to
ninety-eight per cent, of Noodledom. Noodledom was a
deadly poison. An over-dose of it would destroy a whole
nation, and he had known a recent case where it had caused
the death of many thousand men. It was sometimes called
Routine, sometimes Gentlemanly Business, sometimes The
Best Intentions, and sometimes Amiable Incapacity ; but, call
it what you would, analysis always resolved it into Noodle-
dom. There was nothing in the whole united domains of the
animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, so incompatible
with all the functions of life as Noodledom. It was pro-
ducible with most unfortunate ease. Transplant anything
from soil and conditions it was fit for, to soil and condi-
tions it was not fit for, and you immediately had Noodle-
dom. The germs of self-propagation contained within
this baleful poison, were incalculable: Noodledom uni-
formly and constantly engendering Noodledom, until every
available inch of space was over-run by it. The history of
the adulteration of the drug now before the Commission, he
conceived to be this: — Every wholesale dealer in that drug
was sure to have on hand, in beginning business, a large stock
of Noodledom ; which was extremely cheap, and lamentably
abundant. He immediately mixed the drug with the poison.
Now, it was the peculiarity of the Public Office trade that
232 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the wholesale dealers were constantly retiring from business,
and having successors. A new dealer came into possession
of the already adulterated stock, and he, in his turn, infused
into it a fresh quantity of Noodledom from his own private
store. Then, on his retirement, came another dealer who did
the same; then on his retirement, another dealer who did
the same; and so on. Thus, many of the samples before the
Commission, positively contained nothing but Noodledom — •
enough, in short, to paralyse the whole country. To the
question, whether the useful properties of the drug before
the Commission were not of necessity impaired by these mal-
practices, Mr. Bull replied, that all the samples were perni-
ciously weakened, and that half of them were good for noth-
ing. To the question, how he would remedy a state of things
so much to be deplored, Mr. Bull replied, that he would take
the drug out of the hands of mercenary dealers altogether.
Mr. Bull next exhibited three or four samples of Lawn-
sleeves, warranted at the various establishments from which
they had been procured, to be fine and spotless, but evidently
soiled and composed of inferior materials ill made up. On
one pair, he pointed out extensive stains of printer's-ink, of
a very foul kind ; also a coarse inter-weaving, which on exam-
ination clearly betrayed, without the aid of the microscope,
the fibres of the thistle, Old Bailey Attorneyism. A third
pair of these sleeves, though sold as white, were really noth-
ing but the ordinary Mammon pattern, chalked over — a fact
which Mr. Bull showed to be beyond dispute, by merely hold-
ing them up to the light. He represented this branch of
industry as overstocked, and in an unhealthy condition.
There were then placed upon the table, several samples of
British Peasant, to which Mr. Bull expressed himself as par-
ticularly solicitous to draw the attention of the Commission,
with one plain object: the good of his beloved country. He
remarked that with that object before him, he would not in-
quire into the general condition, whether perfectly healthy
or otherwise, of any of the samples now produced. He would
not ask, whether this specimen or that specimen might have
been stronger, larger, better fitted for wear and tear, and less
liable to early decay, if the human creature were reared with
OUR COMMISSION 233
a little more of such care, study, and attention, as were right-
fully bestowed on the vegetable world around it. But, the
samples before the Commission had been obtained from every
county in England, and, though brought from opposite parts
of the kingdom, were alike deficient in the ability to defend
their country by handling a gun or a sword, or by uniting
in any mode of action, as a disciplined body. It was said in
a breath, that the English were not a military people, and
that they made (equally on the testimony of their friends
and enemies), the best soldiers in the world. He hoped that
in a time of war and common danger he might take the liberty
of putting those opposite assertions into the crucible of Com-
mon Sense, consuming the Humbug, and producing the
Truth — at any rate he would, whether or no. Now, he
begged to inform the Commission that, in the samples before
them and thousands of others, he had carefully analysed and
tested the British Peasant, and had found him to hold in com-
bination just the same qualities that he always had possessed.
Analysing and testing, however, as a part of the inquiry,
certain other matters not fairly to be separated from it, he
(Mr. Bull) had found the said Peasant to have been some
time ago disarmed by lords and gentlemen who were jealous
of their game, and by administrations — hirers of spies and
suborners of false witnesses — who were' jealous of their power.
'So, if you wish to restore to these samples,' said Mr. Bull,
'the serviceable quality that I find to be wanting in them, and
the absence of which so much surprises you, be a little more
patriotic and a little less timorously selfish ; trust your Peas-
ant a little more ; instruct him a little better in a freeman's
knowledge — not in a good child's merely ; and you will soon
have your Saxon Bowmen with percussion rifles, and may save
the charges of your Foreign Legion.'
Having withdrawn the samples to which his observations
referred — the production whereof, in connection with Mr.
Bull's remarks, had powerfully impressed the assembled Com-
mission, some of whom even went so far as to register vows
on the spot that they would look into this matter some day —
Mr. Bull laid before the Commission a great variety of ex-
tremely fine specimens of genuine British Job. He expressed
234 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
his opinion that these thriving Plants upon the public prop-
erty, were absolutely immortal: so surprisingly did they flour-
ish, and so perseveringly were they cultivated. Job was the
only article he had found in England, in a perfectly unadul-
terated state. He congratulated the Commission on there
being at least one commodity enjoyed by Great Britain, with
which nobody successfully meddled, and of which the Public
always had an ample supply, unattended by the smallest pros-
pect of failure in the perennial crop.
On the subsidence of the sensation of pleasure with which
this gratifying announcement was received, Mr. Bull in-
formed the Commission, that he now approached the most
serious and the most discouraging part of his task. He
would not shrink from a faithful description of the laborious
and painful analysis which formed the crown of his labours,
but he would prepare the Commission to be shocked by it.
With these introductory words, he laid before them a speci-
men of Representative Chamber.
When the Commission had examined, obviously with emo-
tions of the most poignant and painful nature, the miserable
sample produced, Mr. Bull proceeded with his description.
The specimen of Representative Chamber to which he invited
their anxious attention, was brought from Westminster Mar-
ket. It had been collected there in the month of July in
the present year. No particular counter had been resorted
to more than another, but the whole market had been laid
under contribution to furnish the sample. Its diseased con-
dition would be apparent, without any scientific aids, to the
most short-sighted individual. It was fearfully adulterated
with Talk, stained with Job, and diluted with large quantities
of colouring matter of a false and deceptive nature. It was
thickly overlaid with a varnish which he had resolved into
its component parts, and had found to be made of Trash
(both maudlin and defiant), boiled up with large quantities
of Party Turpitude, and a heap of Cant. Cant, he need not
tell the Commission, was the worst of poisons. It was almost
inconceivable to him how an article in itself so wholesome as
Representative Chamber, could have been got into this dis-
graceful state. It was mere Carrion, wholly unfit for human
OUR COMMISSION 235
consumption, and calculated to produce nausea and vomit-
ing.
On being questioned by the Commission, whether, in addi-
tion to the deleterious substances already mentioned, he had
detected the presence of Humbug in the sample before them,
Mr. Bull replied, 'Humbug? Rank Humbug, in one form or
another, pervades the entire mass.' He went on to say, that
he thought it scarcely in human nature to endure, for any
length of time, the close contemplation of this specimen: so
revolting was it to all the senses. Mr. Bull was asked,
whether he could account ; first, for this alarming degeneracy
in an article so important to the Public; and secondly, for
its acceptance by the Public? The Commission observing
that however the stomachs of the people might revolt at it —
and justly — still they did endure it, and did look on at the
Market in which it was exposed. In answer to these inquiries,
Mr. Bull offered the following explanation.
In respect of the wretched condition of the article itself
(he said), he attributed that result, chiefly, to its being in
the hands of those unprincipled wholesale dealers to whom
he had already referred. When one of those dealers suc-
ceeded to a business — or 'came in,' according to the slang of
the trade — his first proceeding, after the adulteration of
Public Office with Noodledom, was to consider how he could
adulterate and lower his Representative Chamber. This he
did by a variety of arts, recklessly employing the dirtiest
agents. Now, the trade had been so long in the hands of
these men, and one of them had so uniformly imitated an-
other (however violent their trade-opposition might be among
themselves), in adulterating this commodity, that respectable
persons who wished to do business fairly, had been prevented
from investing their capital, whatever it might be, in this
branch of commerce, and had indeed been heard to declare in
many instances that they would prefer the calling of an
honest scavenger. Again, it was to be observed, that the
before-mentioned dealers, being for the most part in a large
way, had numbers of retainers, tenants, tradesmen, and work-
people, upon whom they put off their bad Representative
Chamber, by compelling them to take it whether they liked it
236 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
or not. In respect of the acceptance of this dreadful com-
modity by the Public, Mr. Bull observed, that it was not to
be denied that the Public had been much too prone to accept
the colouring matter in preference to the genuine article.
Sometimes it was Blood, and sometimes it was Beer; some-
times it was Talk, and sometimes it was Cant ; but, mere col-
ouring-matter they certainly had too often looked for, when
they should have looked for bone and sinew. They suffered
heavily for it now, and he believed were penitent; there was
no doubt whatever in his mind that they had arrived at the
mute stage of indignation, and had thoroughly found this
article out.
One further question was put by the Commission : namely,
what hope had the witness of seeing this necessary of English
life, restored to a genuine and wholesome state? Mr. Bull
returned, that his sole hope was in the Public's resolutely re-
jecting all colouring matter whatsoever — in their being
equally inexorable with the dealers, whether they threatened
or cajoled — and in their steadily insisting on being provided
with the commodity in a pure and useful form. The Com-
mission then adjourned, in exceedingly low spirits, sine die.
PROPOSALS FOR A NATIONAL
JEST-BOOK
[MAY 3, 1856]
IT has been ascertained, within the last two years, that
Britannia is in want of nothing but an official joker. Hav-
ing such exalted officer to poke her in the ribs when she con-
siders her condition serious, and to put her off with a wink
when she utters a groan, she must certainly be flourishing
and it shall be heresy to doubt the fact. By this sign ye shall
know it.
My patriotism and my national pride have been so warmed
by the discovery, that, following out the great idea, I have
reduced to writing a scheme for the re-establishment of the
PROPOSALS FOR A JEST-BOOK 237
obsolete office of Court Joker. It would be less expensive
to maintain than a First Lord of the Jokery, and might lead
to the discovery of better jokes than issue from that Depart-
ment. My scheme is an adaptation of a plan I matured somo
years ago, for the revival of the office of Lord Mayor's
Fool ; a design which, I am authorised to mention, would have
been adopted by the City of London, but for that eminent
body, the Common Council, agreeing to hold the office in
Commission, and to satisfy the public, in all their Addresses
to great personages, that they are never unmindful of its
comic duties.
It is not, however, of either of these ingenious proposals
(if I may be permitted to call them so) that I now desire to
treat. It is of another and far more comprehensive project
for the compilation of a National Jest-Book.
Few people, I submit, can fail to have observed what rich
materials for such a collection are constantly being strewn
about. The Parliamentary debates, the audiences given to
deputations at the public offices, the proceedings of Courts
of Enquiry, the published correspondence of distinguished
personages, teem with the richest humour. Is it not a re-
proach to us, as a humorous nation, that we have no recog-
nised Encyclopaedia of these facetious treasures, which may
be preserved, and (in course of time), catalogued, by Signor
Panizzi in the British Museum?
What I propose is, that a learned body of not fewer than
forty members, each to receive two thousand five hundred
pounds per annum, free of Income Tax, and the whole to be
chosen from the younger sons, nephews, cousins and cousin-
germans, of the Aristocracy, be immediately appointed in
perpetuity for the compilation of a National Jest-Book.
That, in these appointments, the preference shall be given to
those young noblemen and gentlemen who know the least of
the subject, and that every care shall be taken to exclude
qualified persons. That, the First Lord of the Jokery be, in
right of his office, the President of this Board, and that in his
patronage the appointments shall rest. That, it shall meet
as seldom as it thinks proper. That, no one shall be a quo-
238 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
rum. That, on the first of April in every year, this learned
society shall publish an annual volume, in imperial quarto, of
the National Jest-Book, price Ten Pounds.
I foresee that I shall be met at this point by the objection
that the proposed price is high, and that the sale of the Na-
tional Jest-Book will not remunerate the country for the cost
of its production. But, this objection will instantly vanish
when I proceed to state that it is one of my leading ideas to
make this gem of books the source of an immense addition to
the public revenue, by passing an act of Parliament to render
it compulsory on all householders rated to the relief of the
poor in the annual value of twenty-five pounds, to take a
copy. The care of this measure I would entrust to Mr. Fred-
erick Peel, the distinguished Under-Secretary for War, whose
modest talents, conciliatory demeanour, and remarkable suc-
cess in quartering soldiers on all the private families of Scot-
land, particularly point him out as the Statesman for the pur-
pose.
As the living languages are not much esteemed in the public
schools frequented by the superior classes, and as it might be
on the whole expedient to publish a National collection in the
National tongue (though too common and accessible), it is
probable that some revision of the labours of the learned
Board would be necessary before any volume should be finally
committed to the press. Such revision I would entrust to the
Royal Literary Fund, finding it to have one professor of
literature a member of its managing committee. It might
not be amiss to embellish the first volume of the National Jest-
Book with a view of that wealthy institution, and with ex-
planatory letterpress descriptive of its spending forty pounds
in giving away a hundred ; of its being governed by a council
which can never meet nor be by any earthly power called
together, of its boasted secrets touching the distresses of
authors being officially accessible at all times, to more than
one publisher ; and of its being a neat example of a practical
joke.
The style of the National Jest-Book, in narrating those
choice pieces of wit and humour of which it will be the store-
house, to be strictly limited (as everything in the Unitec
PROPOSALS FOR A JEST-BOOK 239
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ought to be), by
precedent. No departure from the established Jest-Book
method, to be sanctioned on any account. If the good old
style were sufficient for our forefathers, it is sufficient for the
present and all future generations. In my desire to render
these proposals, plain, complete, and practical, I proceed to
offer some specimens of the manner in which the National Jest-
Book will require to be conducted.
As, in the precedents, there is a supposititious personage,
by name Tom Brown, upon whom witty observations are
fathered which there is a difficulty in fastening on any one
else, so, in the National Collection, it will be indispensable to
introduce a similar fiction. I propose that a certain imag-
inary Mr. Bull be established as the Tom Brown of the Na-
tional collection.
Let us suppose, for example, that the learned Board, in
pursuing their labours for the present year one thousand
eight hundred and fifty-six, were reducing to writing the
National jests of the month of April. They would proceed
according to the following example.
BULL AND THE M. P.
A waggish member of Parliament, when vaccination had
been introduced by Dr. Jenner upwards of half a century,
and had saved innumerable thousands of people from prema-
ture death, from suffering, and from disfigurement — as, down
to that time, had been equally well-known to wise men and
fools — rose in his place in the House of Commons and de-
nounced it forsooth. 'For,' says he, 'it is a failure, and the
cause of death.' One meeting Mr. Bull, and telling him of
this pretty speech, and further of its eliciting from that aston-
ishing assembly no demonstration. 'Aye,' cries Bull, looking
mighty grave, 'but if the Member for Nineveh had mistaken,
in that same place, the Christian name of a Cornet in the
Guards, you should have had howling enough !'
Again, another example.
240 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
BULL AND THE BISHOP
A certain Bishop who was officially a learned priest and a
devout, but who was individually either imbecile or an abusive
and indecent common fellow, printed foul letters wherein he
called folks by bad names, as Devils, Liars, and the like. A
Cambridge man, meeting Bull, asked him of what family this
Bishop was and to whom he was related? 'Nay, I know not,'
cries Bull, 'but I take my oath he is neither of the line of
the apostles, nor descends from their Master.' 'How, now,'
quoth the Cambridge man, 'hath he no connection with
the Fishermen?' 'He hath the connection that Billings-
gate hath with Fishermen, and no other,' says Bull.
'But,' quoth the Cambridge man again, 'I understand
him to be great in the dead tongues.' 'He may be that too,'
says Bull, 'and yet be small in the living ones, for he can
neither write his own tongue nor yet hold it.'
Sometimes it would be necessary, as in the Tom Brown
precedents, to represent Bull in the light of being innocently
victimised, and as not possessing that readiness which charac-
terises him in the foregoing models. The learned body form-
ing the National Collection would then adopt the following
plan.
BULL GOT THE BETTER OF
Bull, riding once from market on a stout Galloway nag,
was met upon the Tiverton highway by a footpad in a sol-
dier's coat (an old hand), who rifled him of all he carried
and jeered him besides, saying, 'A fig for you. I can wind
you round my finger, I can pull your nose any day,' — and
doing it, too, contemptuously, while he spoke, so that he
brought the blood mounting into Bull's cheeks. 'Prithee tell
me,' says Bull, pacifically, 'why do you want my money?'
'For the vigorous prosecution of your war against the birds
of prey,' replies the fellow with his tongue in his cheek,—
who indeed had been hired by Bull to scare those vermin, just
when the farm-traps and blunderbusses had been found to be
horribly out of order, and were beginning to be put right.
For which he now took all the credit. 'But what have you
PROPOSALS FOR A JEST-BOOK 241
done?' asks Bull. 'Never you mind,' says the fellow, tweak-
ing him by the nose again. 'You have not made one good
shot in any direction that I know of,' cries Bull ; 'is that vig-
orous prosecution?' 'Yes,' cries the fellow, tweaking him by
the nose again. 'You have discomfited me the best and
bravest boys I sent into the field,' says Bull ; 'is that vigorous
prosecution?' 'Yes,' cries the fellow, tweaking him by the
nose again. 'You have brought down upon my head the
heaviest and shamefullest book with a blue cover (called the
Fall of Kars) in all my library,' says Bull; 'is that vigorous
prosecution?' 'Yes,' says the fellow, tweaking him by the
nose again. 'Then,' whispers Bull to his Galloway nag, as
he gave him the rein, 'you and I had better jog along feebly,
for it should seem to be the only true way of prospering.'
And so sneaked off.
Occasionally, the learned body would resort to the dialogue
form, for variety's sake. As thus ; — throughout these in-
stances, I suppose them engaged with the compilation for
the month of April in the present year.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN BULL AND A PEESON OF QUALITY
PERSON OF Q. So, Bull, how dost?
BULL. My humble duty and service to your lordship, with
your lordship's gracious leave — I am tolerable.
PERSON OF Q. The better for a firm, and durable, and glo-
rious peace ; eh, Bull?
BULL. Humph !
PERSON OF Q. Why, what a curmudgeon art thou, Bull!
Dost thou begrudge the peace !
BULL. The Lord forbid, my humble duty and service to
your noble lordship. But I was thinking (by your lordship's
favour) how best to keep it.
PERSON OF Q. Be easy on that point. There shall be a
great standing-army, and a great navy, and your relations
and friends shall have more than their share of the bad,
doubtful, and indifferent posts in both.
BULL. How as to the good posts, your honourable lord-
ship ?
PERSON OF Q. Humph! (laughing).
242 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
BULL. Will your noble honour vouchsafe me a word?
PERSON OF Q. Quickly then, Bull, and don't be prosy. I
can't abide being bored.
BULL. I humbly thank your noble honourable lordship for
your noble honour's kind permission. Army and navy, I
know, will both be necessary; but, I was thinking (saving
your noble lordship's gracious presence) that my good friends
and allies the people of France can move in concert in large
bodies, and are accustomed to the use of arms.
PERSON OF Q. (frowning). A military nation. None of
that here, Bull, none of that here !
BULL. With your noble lordship's magnificent toleration,
I would respectfully crave leave to scatter a few deferential
syllables in the radiancy of your noble countenance. I find
that this characteristic is not peculiar to my friends the
French, but belongs, more or less, to all the peoples of Eu-
rope: whereof the English are the only people possessing
the peculiarity of being quite untrained in the power of asso-
ciating to defend themselves, their children, their women, and
their native land. Will your noble honour's magnanimity
bear with me if I represent that your noble lordship has for
some years now, discouraged the old British spirit, and dis-
armed the British hand? Your noble honour's Game Pre-
serves, and political sentiments, have been the cause of —
PERSON OF Q. (interrupting). 'Sdeath, Bull, I am bored.
Make an end of this.
BULL. With your honour's gracious attention, I will fin-
ish this minute. I was about to represent, with my humblest
duty to your noble lordship, that if your honourable grace
could find it in your benignity to take the occasion of this
Peace to trust your countrymen a little — to show some greater
confidence in their love of their country and their loyalty to
their sovereign— to think more of the peasants and less of
the pheasants— and if your worship's loftiness could deign
to encourage the common English clay to become moulded
into so much of a soldierly shape as would make it a ram-
part for the whole empire, and place the Englishman on an
equality with the Frenchmen, the Piedmontese, the German,
the American, the Swiss, your noble honour would therein do a
PROPOSALS FOR A JEST-BOOK 243
great right, timely, which you will otherwise, as certain as
Death, (if your noble lordship will excuse that levelling
word), at last condescend to try to do in a hurry when it
shall be too late.
PERSON OF Q. (yawning). Prithee, get out, Bull. This is
revolutionary, and what not ; and I am bored.
BULL. I humbly thank your noble lordship for your gra-
cious attention. (And so, bowing low, retires, expressing
his high sense of the courtesy and patience with which he
has had the distinguished honour of being received.)
I shall conclude by offering one other example for the
guidance of the learned Commission of forty compilers, which
I have no doubt will be appointed within a short time after
the publication of these suggestions. It is important, as
introducing Mrs. Bull, and showing how she may be discreetly
admitted into the National Jest-Book, on occasions, with the
conjugal object of eliciting Mr. Bull's best points.
Example.
MRS. BULL'S CURLPAPERS
Bull, in this same month of April, takes it into his head
that he will make a trip to France. So away he goes, after
first repairing to the warehouse of honest Murray in Albe-
marle Street, Piccadilly, to buy a guide-book, and travels
with all diligence both to Paris and Bordeaux. Suddenly,
and while Mrs. Bull supposeth him to be sojourning in the
wine-growing countries, not drinking water there you may be
sure, lo, he reappeareth at his own house in London, attended
by a great wagon filled with newspapers ! Mrs. Bull, ad-
miring to see so many newspapers and those foreign, asks
him why he hath returned so soon and with that cargo?
Saith Bull, 'They are French curlpapers for thy head, my
dear.' Mrs. Bull protests that in all her life she never can
have need of a hundredth part of that store. 'Anyhow,'
saith Bull, 'put them away in the dark, housewife, for I am
heartily ashamed of them.' 'Ashamed of them !' says she.
'Yes,' retorts Bull, 'and thus it is. While I was in France,
sweetheart, a deputation waited on the Government in Eng-
land, touching the duties on foreign wines. And the French
244 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
newspapers were so astounded by the jokery with which the
deputation was received, and by the ignorance of the Gov-
ernment, which was wrong in all its statements (one of the
best informed among them computes to the extent, in one
calculation, of seventeen hundred and fifty per cent.), that
I was ashamed to see those journals lying about, and bought
up all I could find !'
My project for a National Jest-Book is now before the
Public. I would merely remark, in conclusion, that if the
revenue arising from the compulsory purchase of the col-
lection should enable our enlightened Government to dispense
with the Income Tax, the Public will be the gainers: inas-
much as the new impost will provide them with something
tangible to show for their money.
A DECEMBER VISION
[DECEMBER 14, 1850]
I SAW a mighty Spirit, traversing the world without any rest
or pause. It was omnipresent, it was all powerful, it had
no compunction, no pity, no relenting sense that any appeal
from any of the race of men could reach. It was invisible
to every creature born upon the earth, save once to each. It
turned its shaded face on whatsoever living thing, one time;
and straight the end of that thing was come. It passed
through the forest, and the vigorous tree it looked on shrunk
away; through the garden, and the leaves perished and the
flowers withered; through the air, and the eagles flagged
upon the wing and dropped; through the sea, and the
monsters of the deep floated, great wrecks, upon the waters.
It met the eyes of lions in their lairs, and they were dust ; its
shadow darkened the faces of young children lying asleep,
and they awoke no more.
It had its work appointed ; it inexorably did what was ap-
pointed to it to do; and neither sped nor slackened. Called
to, it went on unmoved, and did not come. Besought, by
some who felt that it was drawing near, to change its course,
it turned its shaded face upon them, even while they cried,
A DECEMBER VISION
and they were dumb. It passed into the midst of palace
chambers, where there were lights and music, pictures, dia-
monds, gold and silver; crossed the wrinkled and the grey,
regardless of them ; looked into the eyes of a bright bride ;
and vanished. It revealed itself to the baby on the old
crone's knee, and left the old crone wailing by the fire. But,
whether the beholder of its face were, now a king, or now a
labourer, now a queen, or now a seamstress ; let the hand it
palsied be on the sceptre, or the plough, or yet too small and
nerveless to grasp anything: the Spirit never paused in its
appointed work, and sooner or later turned its impartial face
on all.
I saw a Minister of State, sitting in his Closet ; and round
about him, rising from the country which he governed, up
to the Eternal Heavens, was a low dull howl of Ignorance.
It was a wild, inexplicable mutter, confused, but full of
threatening, and it made all hearers' hearts to quake within
them. But, few heard. In the single city where this Min-
ister of State was seated, I saw Thirty Thousand children,
hunted, flogged, imprisoned, but not taught — who might
have been nurtured by the wolf or bear, so little of humanity
had they within them or without — all joining in this doleful
cry. And, ever among them, as among all ranks and grades
of mortals, in all parts of the globe, the Spirit went ; and
ever by thousands, in their brutish state, with all the gifts of
God perverted in their breasts or trampled out, they died.
The Minister of State, whose heart was pierced by even the
little he could hear of these terrible voices, day and night
rising to Heaven, went among the Priests and Teachers of
all denominations, and faintly said:
'Hearken to this dreadful cry ! What shall we do to
stay it?'
One body of respondents answered, 'Teach this!'
Another said, 'Teach that!'
Another said, 'Teach neither this nor that, but t' other !'
Another quarrelled with all the three ; twenty others quar-
relled with all the four, and quarrelled no less bitterly among
themselves. The voices, not stayed by this, cried out day
and night; and still, among those many thousands, as among
246 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
all mankind, went the Spirit, who never rested from its
labour; and still, in brutish sort, they died.
Then, a whisper murmured to the Minister of State:
'Correct this for thyself. Be bold ! Silence these voices,
or virtuously lose thy power in the attempt to do it. Thou
canst not sow a grain of good seed in vain. Thou knowest
it well. Be bold, and do thy duty P
The Minister shrugged his shoulders, and replied 'It is a
great wrong — BUT IT WILL LAST MY TIME.' And so he put
it from him.
Then, the whisper went among the Priests and Teachers,
saying to each, 'In thy soul thou knowest it is a truth, O
man, that there are good things to be taught, on which all
men may agree. Teach those, and stay this cry.'
To which, each answered in like manner, 'It is a great
wrong — BUT IT WILL LAST MY TIME.' And so Jie put it from
him.
I saw a poisoned air, in which Life drooped. I saw Dis-
ease, arrayed in all its store of hideous aspects, and appalling
shapes, triumphant in every alley, by-way, court, back-street,
and poor abode, in every place where human beings congre-
gated— in the proudest and most boastful places, most of
all. I saw innumerable hosts foredoomed to darkness, dirt,
pestilence, obscenity, misery, and early death. I saw, where-
soever I looked, cunning preparations made for defacing the
Creator's Image, from the moment of its appearance here on
earth, and stamping over it the image of the Devil. I saw,
from those reeking and pernicious stews, the avenging con-
sequences of such Sin issuing forth, and penetrating to the
highest places. I saw the rich struck down in their strength,
their darling children weakened and withered, their mar-
riageable sons and daughters perish in their prime. I saw
that not one miserable wretch breathed out his poisoned life
in the deepest cellar of the most neglected town, but, from
the surrounding atmosphere, some particles of his infection
were borne away, charged with heavy retribution on the
general guilt.
There were many attentive and alarmed persons looking
on, who saw these things too. They we're well clothed, and
A DECEMBER VISION 247
had purses in their pockets ; they were educated, full of kind-
ness, and loved mercy. They said to one another, 'This is
horrible, and shall not be !' and there was a stir among them
to set it right. But, opposed to these, came a small multi-
tude of noisy fools and greedy knaves, whose harvest was in
such horrors; and they, with impudence and turmoil, and
with scurrilous jests at misery and death, repelled the better
lookers-on, who soon fell back, and stood aloof.
Then, the whisper went among those better lookers-on,
saying, 'Over the bodies of those fellows, to the remedy !'
But, each of them moodily shrugged his shoulders, and
replied, 'It is a great wrong — BUT IT WILL LAST MY TIME !'
And so they put it from them.
I saw a great library of laws and law-proceedings, so com-
plicated, costly, and unintelligible, that, although numbers of
lawyers united in a public fiction that these were wonderfully-
just and equal, there was scarcely an honest man among
them, but who said to his friend, privately consulting him,
'Better put up with a fraud or other injury than grope for
redress through the manifold blind turnings and strange
chances of this system.'
I saw a portion of the system, called (of all things)
Equity, which was ruin to suitors, ruin to property, a shield
for wrong-doers having money, a rack for right-doers having
none: a by-word for delay, slow agony of mind, despair, im-
poverishment, trickery, confusion, insupportable .injustice.
A main part of it, I saw prisoners wasting in gaol; mad
people babbling in hospitals ; suicides chronicled in the yearly
records ; orphans robbed of their inheritance ; infants righted
(perhaps) when they were grey.
Certain lawyers and laymen came together, and said tc
one another, 'In only one of these our Courts of Equity,
there are years of this dark perspective before us at the pres-
ent moment. We must change this.'
Uprose, immediately, a throng of others, Secretaries, Petty
Bags, Hanapers, Chaff-waxes, and what not, singing (in
answer) 'Rule Britannia,' and 'God save the Queen'; making
flourishing speeches, pronouncing hard names, demanding
committees, commissions, commissioners, and other scare-
248 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
crows, and terrifying the little band of innovators out of
their five wits.
Then, the whisper went among the latter, as they shrunk
back, saying, 'If there is any wrong within the universal
knowledge, this wrong is. Go on ! Set it right !'
Whereon, each of them sorrowfully thrust his hands in his
pockets, and replied, 'It is indeed a great wrong — BUT IT WILL
LAST MY TIME !' — and so they put it from them.
The Spirit, with its face concealed, summoned all the peo-
ple who had used this phrase about their Time, into its
presence. Then, it said, beginning with the Minister of
State:
"Of what duration is your Time?'
The Minister of State replied, 'My ancient family has al-
ways been long-lived. My father died at eighty-four; my
grandfather at ninety-two. We have the gout, but bear it
(like our honours) many years.'
'And you,' said the Spirit to the Priests and Teachers,
'What may your time be?'
Some, believed they were so strong, as that they should
number many more years than threescore and ten ; others,
were the sons of old incumbents who had long outlived youth-
ful expectants. Others, for any means they had of calculat-
ing, might be long-lived or short-lived — generally (they had a
strong persuasion ) long. So, among the well-clothed lookers-
on. So among the lawyers and laymen.
'But, every man, as I understand you, one and all,' said
the Spirit, 'has his time?'
'Yes!' they exclaimed together.
'Yes,' said the Spirit; 'and it is — ETERNITY! Whosoever
is a consenting party to a wrong, comforting himself with
the base reflection that it will last his time, shall bear his
portion of that wrong throughout ALL TIME. And, in the
hour when he and I stand face to face, he shall surely know
it, as mv name is Death!'
It departed, turning its shaded face hither and thither as
it passed along upon its ceaseless work, and blighting all
on whom it looked.
Then went among many trembling hearers the whisper,
LAST WORDS OF THE OLD YEAR 249
saying, 'See, each of you, before you take your ease, 0
wicked, selfish men, that what will "last your time," be Just
enough to last for ever !'
THE LAST WORDS OF THE OLD YEAR
[JANUARY 4, 1851]
THIS venerable gentleman, christened (in the Church of Eng-
land) by the names One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty,
who had attained the great age of three hundred and sixty-five
(days), breathed his last, at midnight, on the thirty -first of
December, in the presence of his confidential business-agents,
the Chief of the Grave Diggers, and the Head Registrar of
Births. The melancholy event took place at the residence of
the deceased, on the confines of Time; and it is understood
that his ashes will rest in the family vault, situated within
the quiet precincts of Chronology.
For some weeks, it had been manifest that the venerable
gentleman was rapidly sinking. He was well aware of his
approaching end, and often predicted that he would expire
at twelve at night, as the whole of his ancestors had done.
The result proved him to be correct, for he kept his time to
the moment.
He had always evinced a talkative disposition, and latterly
became extremely garrulous. Occasionally, in the months of
November and December, he exclaimed, 'No Popery!' with
some symptoms of a disordered mind ; but, generally speak-
ing, was in the full possession of his faculties, and very
sensible.
On the night of his death, being then perfectly collected, he
delivered himself in the following terms, to his friends already
mentioned, the Chief of the Grave Diggers and the Head
Registrar of Births:
'We have done, my friends, a good deal of business to-
gether, and you are now about to enter into the service of my
successor. May you give every satisfaction to him and his !
'I have been,' said the good old gentleman, penitently, 'a
250 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Year of Ruin. I have blighted all the farmers, destroyed the
land, given the final blow to the Agricultural Interest, and
smashed the Country. It is true, I have been a Year of Com-
mercial Prosperity, and remarkable for the steadiness of my
English Funds, which have never been lower than ninety-four,
or higher than ninety-seven and three-quarters. But you will
pardon the inconsistencies of a weak old man.
'I had fondly hoped,' he pursued, with much feeling, ad-
dressing the Chief of the Grave Diggers, 'that, before my de-
cease, you would have finally adjusted the turf over the ashes
of the Honourable Board of Commissioners of Sewers ; the
most feeble and incompetent Body that ever did outrage to
the common sense of any community, or was ever beheld by
any member of my family. But, as this was not to be, I
charge you, do your duty by them in the days of my succes-
sor!'
The Chief of the Grave Diggers solemnly pledged himself
to observe this request. The Abortion of Incapables re-
ferred to, had (he said) done much for him, in the way of
preserving his business, endangered by the recommendations
of the Board of Health ; but, regardless of all personal obli-
gations, he thereby undertook to lay them low. Deeper than
they were already buried in the contempt of the public (this
he swore upon his spade) he would shovel the earth over their
preposterous heads !
The venerable gentleman, whose mind appeared to be relieved
of an enormous load by this promise, stretched out his hand,
and tranquilly returned, 'Thank you ! Bless you !'
'I have been,' he said, resuming his last discourse, after a
short interval of silent satisfaction, 'doomed to witness the
sacrifice of many valuable and dear lives, in steamboats, be-
cause of the want of commonest and easiest precautions for
the prevention of those legal murders. In the days of my
great-grandfather, there yet existed an invention called Pad-
dle-box Boats. Can either of you gild the few remaining
sands fast running through my glass, with the hope that my
great-grandson may see its adoption made compulsory on the
owners of passenger steamships?"
After a despondent pause, the Head Registrar of Births
LAST WORDS OF THE OLD YEAR 251
gently observed that, in England, the recognition of any such
invention by the legislature — particularly if simple, and of
proved necessity — could scarcely be expected under a hun-
dred years. In China, such a result might follow in fifty,
but in England (he considered), in not less than a hundred.
The venerable invalid replied, 'True, true !' and for some min-
utes appeared faint, but afterwards rallied.
'A stupendous material work' ; these were his next words ;
'has been accomplished in my time. Do I, who have wit-
nessed the opening of the Britannia Bridge across the Menai
Straits, and who claim the man who made that bridge for one
of my distinguished children, see through the Tube, as
through a mighty telescope, the Education of the people
coming nearer?'
He sat up in his bed, as he spoke, and a great light seemed
to shine from his eyes.
'Do I,' he said, 'who have been deafened by a whirlwind of
sound and fury, consequent on a demand for Secular Educa-
tion, see any Education through the opening years, for those
who need it most ?'
A film gradually came over his eyes, and he sunk back on
his pillow. Presently, directing his weakened glance towards
the Head Registrar of Births, he asked that personage:
'How many of those whom Nature brings within your
province, in the spot of earth called England, can neither
read nor write in after years?'
The Registrar answered (referring to the last number of
the present publication1), 'about forty-five in every hundred.'
'And in my history for the month of May,' said the old year
with a heavy groan, 'I find it written: "Two little children
whose heads scarcely reached the top of the dock, were
charged at Bow Street on the seventh, with stealing a loaf
out of a baker's shop. They said, in defence, that they were
starving, and their appearance showed that they spoke the
truth. They were sentenced to be whipped in the House of
Correction." To be whipped! Woe, woe! can the State
devise no better sentence for its little children ! Will it never
sentence them to be taught !'
i Household Words.
252 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The venerable gentleman became extremely discomposed in
his mind, and would have torn his white hair from his head,
but for the soothing attentions of his friends.
'In the same month,' he observed, when he became more
calm, 'and within a week, an English Prince was born. Sup-
pose him taken from his Princely home (Heaven's blessing on
it!), cast like these wretched babies on the streets, and sen-
tenced to be left in ignorance; what difference, soon, be-
tween him, and the little children sentenced to be whipped?
Think of it, Great Queen, and become the Royal Mother of
them all !'
The Head Registrar of Births and the Chief of the Grave
Diggers, both of whom have great experience of infancy, pre-
destined (they do not blasphemously suppose, by God, but
know, by man) to vice and shame, were greatly overcome by
the earnestness of their departing friend.
'I have seen,' he presently said, 'a project carried into exe-
cution for a great assemblage of the peaceful glories of the
world. I have seen a wonderful structure, reared in glass,
by the energy and skill of a great natural genius, self-im-
proved: worthy descendant of my Saxon ancestors: worthy
type of industry and ingenuity triumphant! Which of my
children shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants,
of England, equally united, for another Exhibition — for a
great display of England's sins and negligences, to be, by
steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all
hearts and hands, set right? Come hither my Right Rev-
erend Brothers, to whom an English tragedy presented in the
theatre is contamination, but who art a Bishop, none the less,
in right of the translation of Greek Plays ; come hither, from
a life of Latin Verses and Quantities, and study the Humani-
ties through these transparent windows ! Wake, Colleges of
Oxford, from day-dreams of ecclesiastical melodrama, and
look in on these realities in the daylight, for the night cometh
when no man can work ! Listen, my Lords and Gentlemen,
to the roar within, so deep, so real, so low down, so incessant
and accumulative ! Not all the reedy pipes of all the shep-
herds that eternally play one little tune — not twice as manv
LAST WORDS OF THE OLD YEAR 253
feet of Latin verses as would reach from this globe to the
Moon and back — not all the Quantities that are, or ever were,
or will be, in the world — Quantities of Prosody, or Law, or
State, or Church, or Quantities of anything but work in the
right spirit, will quiet it for a second, or clear an inch of space
in this dark Exhibition of the bad results of our doings 1
Where shall we hold it? When shall we open it? What
courtier speaks?'
After the foregoing rhapsody, the venerable gentleman be-
came, for a time, much enfeebled ; and the Chief of the Grave
Diggers took a few minutes' repose.
As the hands of the clock were now rapidly advancing
towards the hour which the invalid had predicted would be
his last, his attendants considered it expedient to sound him as
to his arrangements in connection with his worldly affairs ;
both being in doubt whether these were completed, or, indeed,
whether he had anything to leave. The Chief of the Grave
Diggers, as the fittest person for such an office, undertook it.
He delicately inquired, whether his friend and master had
any testamentary wishes to express? If so, they should be
faithfully observed.
'Thank you,' returned the old gentleman, with a smile, for
he was once more composed; 'I have Something to bequeath
to my successor; but not so much (I am happy to say) as
I might have had. The Sunday Postage question, thank
God, I have got rid of; and the Nepaulese Ambassadors are
gone home. May they stay there !'
This pious aspiration was responded to, with great fervour,
by both the attendants.
'I have seen you,' said the venerable Testator, addressing
the Chief of the Grave Diggers, 'lay beneath the ground, a
great Statesman and a fallen King of France.'
The Chief of the Grave Diggers replied, 'It is true.'
'I desire,' said the Testator, in a distinct voice, 'to entail the
remembrance of them on my successors for ever. Of the
Statesman, as an Englishman who rejected an adventitious
nobility, and composedly knew his own. Of the King, as a
great example that the monarch who addresses himself to the
254 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
meaner passions of humanity, and governs by cunning and
corruption, makes his bed of thorns, and sets his throne on
shifting sand.'
The Head Registrar of Births took a note of the bequest.
*Is there any other wish,' inquired the Chief of the Grava
Diggers, observing that his patron closed his eyes.
'I bequeath to my successor,' said the aged gentleman,
opening them again, 'a vast inheritance of degradation and
neglect in England; and I charge him, if he be wise, to get
speedily through it. I do hereby give and bequeath to him,
also, Ireland. And I admonish him to leave it to his suc-
cessor in a better condition than he will find it. He can
hardly leave it in a worse.'
The scratching of the pen used by the Head Registrar of
Births, was the only sound that broke the ensuing silence.
'I do give and bequeath to him, likewise,' said the Testator,
rousing himself by a vigorous effort, 'the Court of Chancery.
The less he leaves of it to his successor, the better for man-
kind.'
The Head Registrar of Births wrote as expeditiously as
possible, for the clock showed that it was within five minutes
of midnight.
'Also, I do give and bequeath to him,' said the Testator,
'the costly complications of the English law in general. With
which I do hereby couple the same advice.'
The Registrar, coming to the end of his note, repeated,
'The same advice.'
'Also, I do give and bequeath to him,' said the Testator,
'the Window Tax. Also, a general mismanagement of all
public expenditure, revenues, and property, in Great Britain
and its possessions.'
The anxious Registrar, with a glance at the clock, re-
peated, 'And its possessions.'
'Also, I do give and bequeath to him,' said the Testator,
collecting his strength once more, by a surprising effort,
Nicholas Wiseman and the Pope of Rome.'
The two attendants breathlessly inquired together, 'With
what injunctions?'
'To study well,' said the Testator, 'the speech of the Dean
RAILWAY STRIKES 255
of Bristol, made at Bristol aforesaid ; and to deal with them
and the whole vexed question, according to that speech. And
I do hereby give and bequeath to my successor the said speech
and the said faithful Dean, as great possessions and good
guides. And I wish, with all my heart, the said faithful
Dean were removed a little farther to the West of England
and made Bishop of Exeter !'
With this, the Old Year turned serenely on his side, and
breathed his last in peace. Whereon,
-'With twelve great shocks of sound,
Was clash'd and hammer'd from a hundred towers,
One after one,'
the coming of the New Year. He came on, joyfully. The
Head Registrar, making, from mere force of habit, an entry
of his birth, while the Chief of the Grave Diggers took charge
of his predecessor; added these words in Letters of Gold.
MAY IT BE A WISE AND HAPPY YEAR, FOR ALL OF us !
RAILWAY STRIKES
[JANUARY 11, 1851]
EVERYTHING that has a direct bearing on the prosperity, hap-
piness, and reputation of the working-men of England should
be a Household Wrord.
We offer a few remarks on a subject which has recently
attracted their attention, and on which one particular and im-
portant branch of industry has made a demonstration, affect-
ing, more or less, every other branch of industry, and the
whole community ; in the hope that there are few among the
intelligent body of skilled mechanics who will suspect us of
entertaining any other than friendly feelings towards them, or
of regarding them with any sentiment but one of esteem and
confidence.
The Engine Drivers and Firemen on the North Western
line of Railway — the great iron high-road of the Kingdom,
by which communication is maintained with Ireland, Scot-
256 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
land, Wales, the chief manufacturing towns of Great Britain,
and the port which is the main artery of her commerce with
the world — have threatened, for the second time, a simultane-
ous abandonment of their work, and relinquishment of their
engagements with the Company they have contracted to serve.
We dismiss from consideration the merits of the case. It
would be easy, we conceive, to show, that the complaints of
the men, even assuming them to be beyond dispute, were not,
from the beginning of the manifestation, of a grave charac-
ter, or by any means hopeless of fair adjustment. But we
purposely dismiss that question. We purposely dismiss,
also, the character of the Company, for careful, business-
like, generous, and honourable management. We are con-
tent to assume that it stands no higher than the level of the
very worst public servant bearing the name of railway, that
the public possesses. We will suppose Mr. Glyn's communi-
cations with the men, to have been characterised by over-
bearing evasion, and not (as they undoubtedly have been) by
courtesy, good temper, self-command, and the perfect spirit
of a gentleman. We will suppose the case of the Com-
pany to be the worst that such a case could be, in this coun-
try, and in these times. Even with such a reduction of it
to its lowest possible point, and a corresponding elevation of
the case of the skilled Railway servants to its highest, we must
deny the moral right or justification of the latter to exert
the immense power they accidentally possess, to the public
detriment and danger.
We say, accidentally possess, because this power has not
been raised up by themselves. If there be ill-conditioned
spirits among them who represent that it has been, they rep-
resent what is not true, and what a minute's rational consid-
eration will show to be false. It is the result of a vast system
of skilful combination, and a vast expenditure of wealth.
The construction of the line, alone, against all the engineering
difficulties it presented, involved an amount of outlay that was
wonderful, even in England. To bring it to its present state
of working efficiency, a thousand ingenious problems have
been studied and solved, stupendous machines have been con-
structed, a variety of jplans and schemes have been matured
RAILWAY STRIKES 257
with incredible labour: a great whole has been pieced to-
gether by numerous capacities and appliances, and kept in-
cessantly in motion. Even the character of the men, which
stands deservedly high, has not been set up by themselves alone,
but has been assisted by large contributions from these various
sources. Without a good permanent way, and good engine
power, they could not have established themselves in the pub-
lic confidence as good drivers. Without good business-man-
agement in the complicated arrangements of trains for goods
and passengers, they could not possibly have avoided acci-
dents. They have done their part manfully ; but they could
not have done it, without efficient aid in like manful sort, from
every department of the great executive staff. And because
it happens that the whole machine is dependent upon them in
one important stage, and is delivered necessarily into their
control — and because it happens that Railway accidents,
when they do occur, are of a frightful nature, attended with
horrible mutilation and loss of life — and because such acci-
dents, with the best precautions, probably must occur, in the
event of their resignation in a body — is it, therefore, defensi-
ble to strike?
To that, the question comes. It is just so narrow, and no
broader. We all know, perfectly well, that there would be no
strike, but for the extent of the power possessed. Can such
an exercise of it be defended, after due consideration, by any
honest man?
We firmly believe that these are honest men — as honest
men as the world can produce. But, we believe, also, that they
have not well considered what it is that they do. They are
laboriously and constantly employed; and it is the habit of
many men, so engaged, to allow other men to think for them.
These deputy-thinkers are not the most judicious order of
intellects. They are something quick at grievances. They
drive Express Trains to that point, and Parliamentary to all
other points. They are not always, perhaps, the best work-
men. They are, sometimes, not workmen at all, but design-
ing persons, who have, for their own base purposes, im-
meshed the workmen in a system of tyranny and oppression.
Through these, on the one hand, and through an imperfect or
258 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
misguided view of the details of a case on the other, a strike
(always supposing this great power in the strikers) may be
easily set a-going. Once begun, there is aroused a chivalrous
spirit — much to be respected, however mistaken its manifesta-
tion— which forbids all reasoning. 'I will stand by my order,
and do as the rest do. I never flinch from my fellow-work-
men. I should not have thought of this myself; but I wish
to be true to the backbone, and here I put my name among
the others.' Perhaps in no class of society, in any country,
is this principle of honour so strong, as among most great
bodies of English artisans.
But there is a higher principle of honour yet ; and it is that,
we suggest to our friends the Engine Drivers and Firemen on
the North Western Railway, which would lead to these greater
considerations. First, what is my duty to the public, who
are, after all, my chief employers? Secondly, what is my
duty to my fellow-workmen of all denominations: not only
here, upon this Railway, but all over England?
We will suppose Engine Driver, John Safe, entering upon
these considerations with his Fireman, Thomas Sparks.
Sparks is one of the best of men, but he has a great belief in
Caleb Coke of Wolverhampton, and Coke says (because some-
body else has said so, to him) 'Strike!'
'But, Sparks,' argues John Safe, sitting on the side of the
tender, waiting for the Down Express, 'to look at it in these
two ways before we take any measures. — Here we are, a body
of men with a great public charge; hundreds and thousands
of lives every day. Individuals among us may, of course, and
of course do, every now and again give up their part of that
charge, for one reason or another — and right too ! But I 'm
not so sure that we can all turn our backs upon it at once, and
do right.'
Thomas Sparks inquires 'Why not?'
'Why, it seems to me, Sparks,' says John Safe, 'rather a
murderous mode of action.'
Sparks, to whom the question has never presented itself in
this light, turns pale.
'You see,' John Safe pursues, 'when I first came upon this
line, I didn't know— how could I? — where there was a bridge
RAILWAY STRIKES 259
and where a tunnel — where we took the turnpike road —
where there was a cutting — where there was an embankment —
where there was an incline — when full speed, when half, when
slacken, when shut off, when your whistle going, when not. I
got to know all such, by degrees; first, from them that was
used to it ; then, from my own use, Sparks.'
'So you did, John,' said Sparks.
'Well, Sparks ! When we and all the rest that are used to
it, Engine Drivers and Firemen, all down the line and up
again, lay our heads together, and say to the public, "if you
don't back us up in what we want, we '11 all go to the right-
about, such-a-day, so that Nobody shall know all such" —
that 's rather a murderous mode of action, it appears to
me.'
Thomas Sparks, still uncomfortably pale, wishes Coke of
Wolverhampton were present to reply.
'Because, it 's saying to the public, "If you don't back us
up, we '11 do our united best towards your being run away
with, and run into, and smashed, and jammed, and dislocated,
and having your heads took off, and your bodies gleaned for,
in small pieces — and we hope you may !" Now, you know,
that has a murdering appearance, Sparks, upon the whole!'
says John Safe.
Sparks, much shocked, suggests that 'it mightn't happen.'
'True. But it might,' returns John Safe, 'and we know
it might, no men better. We threaten that it might. Now,
when we entered into this employment, Sparks, I doubt if it
was any part of our fair bargain, that we should have a
monopoly of this line, and a manslaughtering sort of a power
over the public. What do you think?'
Thomas Sparks thinks certainly not. But, Coke of Wol-
verhampton said, last Wednesday (as somebody else had said
to him), that every man worthy of the name of Briton must
stick up for his rights.
'There again !' says John Safe. 'To my mind, Sparks,
it 's not at all clear that any person's rights can be another
person's wrongs. And, that our strike must be a wrong to the
persons we strike against, call 'em Company or Public, seems
pretty plain.'
260 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
'What do they go and unite against us for, then?' de-
mands Thomas Sparks.
'I don't know what they do,' replies John Safe. 'We took
service with this company as Individuals, ourselves, and not
as a body ; and you know very well we no more ever thought
of turning them off, as one man, than they ever thought of
turning us off as one man. If the Company is a body, now,
it was a body all the same when we came into its employment
with our eyes wide open, Sparks.'
'Why do they make aggravating rules then, respecting the
Locomotives?' demands Mr. Sparks, 'which, Coke of Wolver-
hampton says, is Despotism 1'
'Well, anyways they 're made for the public safety,
Sparks,' returns John Safe ; 'and what 's for the public
safety, is for yours and mine. The first things to go, in a
smash, is, generally, the Engine and Tender.'
'/ don't want to be made more safe,' growls Thomas Sparks.
'/ am safe enough, / am.'
'But, it don't signify a cinder whether you want it or
don't want it,' returns his companion. 'You must be made
safe, Sparks, whether you like or not, — if not on your own
account, on other people's.'
'Coke of Wolverhampton says, Justice! That's what
Coke says P observes Mr. Sparks, after a little deliberation.
'And a very good thing it is to say,' returns John Safe.
'A better thing to do. But let 's be sure we do it. I can't
see that we good workmen do it to ourselves and families, by
letting in bad un's that are out of employment. That 's as
to ourselves. I am sure we don't do it to the Company or
Public, by conspiring together, to turn an accidental ad-
vantage against 'em. Look at other people! Gentlemen
don't strike. Union doctors are bad enough paid (which
we are not), but they don't strike. Many dispensary and
hospital-doctors are not over well treated, but they don't
strike, and leave the sick a-groaning in their beds. So much
for the use of power. Then for taste. The respectable
young men and women that serve in the shops, they didn't
strike, when they wanted early closing.'
RAILWAY STRIKES 261
'All the world wasn't against them,' Thomas Sparks puts
in.
'No ; if it had been, a man might have begun to doubt their
being in the right,' returns John Safe.
'Why, you don't doubt our being in the right, I hope?'
says Sparks.
'If I do, I an't alone in it. You know there are scores
and scores of us that, of their own accord, don't want no
striking, nor anything of the kind.'
'Suppose we all agreed that we was a prey to despotism,
what then?' asks Sparks.
'Why, even then, I should recommend our doing our work,
true to the public, and appealing to the public feeling against
the same,' replies John Safe. 'It would very soon act on the
Company. As to the Company and the Public siding to-
gether against us, I don't find the Public too apt to go along
with the Company when it can help it.'
'Don't we owe nothing to our order?' inquires Thomas
Sparks.
'A good deal. And when we enter on a strike like this,
we don't appear to me to pay it. We are rather of the up-
per sort of our order ; and what we owe to other workmen, is,
to set 'em a good example, and to represent them well. Now,
there is, at present, a deal of general talk (here and there,
with a great deal of truth in it) of combinations of capital,
and one power and another, against workmen. I leave you
to judge how it serves the workman's case, at such a time, to
show a small body of his order, combined, in a misuse of
power, against the whole community !'
It appears to us, not only that John Safe might reason-
ably urge these arguments and facts ; but, that John Safe
did actually present many of them, and not remotely sug-
gest the rest, to the consideration of an aggregate meeting of
the Engine Drivers and Firemen engaged on the Southern
Division of the line, which was held at Camden Town on the
day after Christmas Day. The sensible, moderate, and up-
right tone of some men who spoke at that meeting, as we
6nd them reported in the Times, commands our admiration
262 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and respect, though it by no means surprises us. We would
especially commend to the attention of our readers, the
speech of an Engine Driver on the Great Western Railway,
and the letter of the Enginemen and Firemen at the Bedford
Station. Writing, in submission to the necessities of this
publication, immediately after that meeting was held, we are,
of course, in ignorance of the issue of the question, though
it will probably have transpired before the present number
appears. It can, however, in no wise affect the observations
we have made, or those with which we will conclude.
To the men, we would submit, that if they fail in adjust-
ing the difference to their complete satisfaction, the failure
will be principally their own fault, as inseparable, in a great
measure, from the injudicious and unjustifiable threat into
which the more sensible portion of them have allowed them-
selves to be betrayed. What the Directors might have con-
ceded to temperate remonstrance, it is easy to understand they
may deem it culpable weakness to yield to so alarming a com-
bination against the public service and safety.
To the public, we would submit, that the steadiness and
patriotism of English workmen may, in the long run, be
safely trusted; and that this mistake, once remedied, may be
calmly dismissed. It is natural, in the first hot reception of
such a menace, to write letters to newspapers, urging strong-
handed legislation, or the enforcement of pains and penal-
ties, past, present, or to come, on such deserters from their
posts. But, it is not agreeable, on calmer reflection, to con-
template the English artisan as working under a curb or yoke,
or even as being supposed to require one. His spirit is of
the highest ; his nature is of the best. He comes of a great
race, and his character is famous in the world. If a false
step on the part of any man should be generously forgotten,
it should be forgotten in him.
RED TAPE 263
RED TAPE
[FEBRUARY 15, 1851]
YOUR public functionary who delights in Red Tape — the
purpose of whose existence is to tie up public questions,
great and small, in an abundance of this official article — to
make the neatest possible parcels of them, ticket them, and
carefully put them away on a top shelf out of human reach —
is the peculiar curse and nuisance of England. Iron, steel,
adamant, can make no such drag-chain as Red Tape. An
invasion of Red Ants in innumerable millions, would not be
half so prejudicial to Great Britain, as its intolerable Red
Tape.
Your Red Tapist is everywhere. He is always at hand, with
a coil of Red Tape, prepared to make a small official parcel
of the largest subject. In the reception-room of a Govern-
ment Office, he will wind Red Tape round and round the
sternest deputation that the country can send to him. In
either House of Parliament, he will pull more Red Tape out
of his mouth, at a moment's notice, than a conjuror at a
Fair. In letters, memoranda, and despatches, he will spin
himself into Red Tape, by the thousand yards. He will bind
you up vast colonies, in Red Tape, like cold roast chickens
at a rout-supper; and when the most valuable of them break
it (a mere question of time), he will be amazed to find that
they were too expansive for his favourite commodity. He
will put a girdle of Red Tape round the earth, in quicker
time than Ariel. He will measure, from Downing Street to
the North Pole, or the heart of New Zealand, or the highest
summit of the Himalaya Mountains, by inches of Red Tape.
He will rig all the ships in the British Navy with it, weave
all the colours in the British Army from it, completely equip
and fit out the officers and men of both services in it. He
bound Nelson and Wellington hand and foot with it — orna-
mented them, all over, with bunches of it — and sent them
forth to do impossibilities. He will stand over the side of the
steamship of the state, sounding with Red Tape, for imag-
264 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
inary obstacles ; and when the office-seal at the end of his pet
line touches a floating weed, will cry majestically, 'Back her!
Stop her !' He hangs great social efforts, in Red Tape, about
the public offices, to terrify like evil-minded reformers, as
great highwaymen used to be hanged in chains on Hounslow
Heath. He has but one answer to every demonstration of
right, or exposition of wrong; and it is, 'My good Sir, this
is a question of Tape.'
He is the most gentlemanly of men. He is mysterious;
but not more so than a man who is cognisant of so much Tape
ought to be. Butterflies and gadflies who disport themselves,
unconscious of the amount of Red Tape required to keep
Creation together, may wear their hearts upon their sleeves ;
but he is another sort of person. Not that he is wanting ir
conversation. By no means. Every question mooted, he
has to tie up according to form, and put away. Church,
state, territory native and foreign, ignorance, poverty, crime,
punishment, popes, cardinals, Jesuits, taxes, agriculture and
commerce, land and sea — all Tape. 'Nothing but Tape, Sir,
I assure you. Will you allow me to tie this subject up, with
a few yards, according to the official form? Thank you.
Thus, you see. A knot here ; the end cut off there ; a twist in
this place; a loop in that. Nothing can be more complete.
Quite compact, you observe. I ticket it, you perceive, and
put it on the shelf. It is now disposed of. What is the
next article?'
The quantity of Red Tape officially employed in the de-
fence of such an imposition (in more senses than one) as the
Window Tax ; the array of Red Tapists and the amount of Red
Taping employed in its behalf, within the last six or seven
years, is something so astounding in itself, and so illustrative
of the enormous quantities of Tape devoted to the public con-
fusion, that we take the liberty, at this appropriate time, of
disentangling an odd thousand fathoms or so, as a sample of
the commodity.
The Window Tax is a tax of that just and equitable de-
scription, that it charges a house with twenty windows at the
rate of six shillings and twopence farthing a window; and
houses with nine times as many windows, to wit a hundred
RED TAPE 265
and eighty, at the rate of eightpence a window, less. It is a
beautiful feature in this tax (and a mighty convenient one
for large country-houses) that, after progressing in a gradu-
ally ascending scale or charge, from eight windows to seventy-
nine, it then begins to descend again, and charges a house
with five hundred windows, just a farthing a window more
than a house with nine. This has been, for so many years,
proved — by Red Tape — to be the perfection of human rea-
son, that we merely remark upon the circumstance, and there
leave it, for another ornamental branch of the subject.
Light and air are the first essentials of our being. Among
the facts demonstrated by Physical Science, there is not one
more indisputable, than that a large amount of Solar Light
is necessary to the development of the nervous system. Let-
tuces, and some other vegetables, may be grown in the dark,
at no greater disadvantage than a change in their natural
colour ; but, the nervous system of Animals must be developed
by Light. The higher the Animal, the more stringent
and absolute the necessity of a free admission to it of the
Sun's bright rays. All human creatures bred in darkness,
droop, and become degenerate. Among the diseases dis-
tinctly known to be engendered and propagated by the want
of Light, and by its necessary concomitant, the want of free
Air, those dreadful maladies, Scrofula and Consumption, oc-
cupy the foremost place.
At this time of day, and when the labours of Sanitary Re-
formers and Boards of Health have educated the general
mind in the knowledge of such truths, we almost hesitate to
recapitulate these simple facts: which are as palpable and
certain as the growth of a tree, or the curling of a wave.
But, within a few years, it was a main fault of practical Phi-
losophy, to hold too much herself apart from the daily busi-
ness and concerns of life. Consequently, within a few years,
even these truths were imperfectly and narrowly known. Red
Tape, as a great institution quite superior to Nature, posi-
tively refused to receive them — strangled them, out of hand —
labelled them Impositions, and shelved them with great resent-
ment.
This is so incredible, that our readers will naturally in-
266 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
quire, when, where, and how? Thus. In the Spring of
18-14, there sat enthroned, in the office of the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, Downing Street, London, the Incarnation of
Red Tape. There waited upon this enshrinement of Red
Tape in the body and flesh of man, a Deputation from the
Master Carpenters' Society, and another from the Metropoli-
tan Improvement Society, which latter, comprising among
its members some distinguished students of Natural Philoso-
phy, took the liberty of representing the before-mentioned
fact in connection with Light, as a small result of In-
finite Wisdom, eternally established before Tape was. And,
forasmuch as the Window Tax excluded light from the dwell-
ings of the poor in large towns, where the poor lived, crowded
together in large old houses; by tempting the landlords of
those houses to block up windows and save themselves the
payment of duty, which they notoriously did — and, foras-
much, as in every room and corner thus made dark and air-
less, the poor, for want of space, were fain to huddle beds —
and, forasmuch, as a large and a most unnatural percentage
of them, were, in consequence, scrofulous, and consumptive,
and always sliding downwards into Pauperism — the Depu-
tation, prayed the Right Honourable Red Tape, M.P., at
least so to modify this tax, as to modify that inhuman and
expensive wrong. To which, the Right Honourable Red
Tape, M.P., made reply, that he didn't believe that the Tax
had anything to do with scrofula ; 'for,' said he, 'the window-
duties don't affect the cottager ; and I have seen numerous in-
stances of scrofula in my own neighbourhood, among the
families of the agricultural peasantry.' Now, this was the
perfection of what may be called Red Tapeosophy. For,
not to mention the fact, well known to every traveller about
England, that the cottages of agricultural labourers, in gen-
eral, are a perfect model of sanitary arrangement, and are,
in particular remarkable for the capacious dimensions of
their windows (which are usually of the bay or oriel form:
never less than six feet high, commonly fitted with plate
glass, and always capable of being opened freely), it is to be
carefully noticed that such cottages always contain a super-
abundance of room, and especially of sleeping-room: also,
HUD TAPE 267
that nothing can be farther from the custom of a cottager
than to let a sleeping-room to a single man, to diminish his
rent: and to crowd himself and family into one small cham-
ber, where by reason of the dearness of fuel he stops up
crevices, and shuts out air. These being things which no
English landlord, dead or alive, ever heard of, it is clear —
as clear as the agricultural labourer's cottage is light and
airy — that the exclusion of light and air can have nothing to
do with Scrofula. So, the Right Honourable Red Tape,
M.P., gave the lie (politely) to the Deputation, and proved
his case against Nature, to the great admiration of the office
Messengers !
Well! But, on the same occasion, there was more Red
Tape yet, in the background, ready, in nautical phrase, to be
paid out. The Deputation, rather pertinaciously dwelling on
the murderous effects of a prohibition of ventilation in the
thickly-peopled habitations of the poor, the same authority
returned, 'You can ventilate them, if you choose. Here is
Deputy Red Tape, from the Stamp Office, at my elbow ; and
he tells you, that perforated plates of zinc, may be placed
in the external walls of houses, without becoming liable to
duty.' Now, the Deputation were very glad to hear this,
because they knew it to be a part of the perfect wisdom
of the Acts of Parliament establishing the Window Tax, that
they required all stopped-up windows to be stopped up with
precisely the same substance as that of which the external
walls of a house were made; and that, in a variety of cases,
where such walls were of stone, for example, and such win-
dows were stopped up with wood, they were held to be
chargeable with duty: though they admitted no ray of light
through that usually opaque material. Besides which, the
Deputation knew, from the Government Returns, that, under
the same Acts of Parliament, a little unglazed hole in a wall,
made for a cat to creep through, and a little trap in a cellar
to shoot coals down, had been solemnly decided to be windows.
Therefore, they were so much relieved by this perforated-zinc
discovery, that the good and indefatigable Doctor South-
wood Smith (who was one of the deputation) was seen, by
Private John Towler of the Second Grenadier Guards, sentry
268 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
on duty at the Treasury, to fall upon the neck of Mr. Toyn-
bee (who was another of the deputation) and shed tears of
joy in Parliament Street.
But, the President of the Carpenters' Society, a man of
rule and compasses, whose organ of veneration appears (in
respect of Red Tape) to have been imperfectly developed,
doubted. And he, writing to the Stamp Office on the point,
caused more Red Tape to be spun into this piece of informa-
tion, 'that perforated plateg of zinc would be chargeable if
go perforated as to afford light, but not if so as to serve the
purpose of ventilation only !' It not being within the knowl-
edge of the Carpenters' Society (which was a merely prac-
tical body) how to construct perforations of such a peculiar
double-barrelled action as at once to let in air and shut out
light, the Right Honourable Red Tape, M.P., himself, was
referred to for an explanation. This, he gave in the follow-
ing skein, which has justly been considered the highest speci-
men of ilne manufacture. 'There has been no mistake, as
the parties suppose, in stating that openings for ventilation
might be made which would not be chargeable as windows,
and I cannot think it at all inconsistent with such a state-
ment to decline expressing, beforehand, a general opinion
as to whether certain openings when made would or would
not be considered as windows, and as such liable to charge.'
To crown all, with a wreath of blushing Tape of the first
official quality, it may be briefly mentioned, that no existing
Act of Parliament made any such exception, and that it had
no existence out of Tape. For, a local act, for Liverpool
only, was afterwardg passed, exempting from the Window
Tax circular ventilating apertures, not exceeding seven
inches in diameter; provided, that if they were made in a
direct line, they should be protected by a grating of cast-
iron, the interstices thereof not exceeding one quarter of an
inch in width.
One other choice sample of the best Red Tape presents
itself in the nefarious history of the Window Tax. In July
of the same year, Lord Althorp — whose name is ever to be
respected, as having, perhaps, less association with Red Tape
RED TAPE 269
than that of any Minister whomsoever — made a short speech
in the House of Commons, descriptive of an enactment he
then introduced, for allaying something of the indignation
which this tax had raised. It was, he said, 'a clause, en-
abling persons to open fresh windows in houses at present ex-
isting, without any additional charge. Its only effect is, to
prevent an increase of the revenue, in the case of houses
already existing.' On the faith of this statement, numbers
of house-occupiers opened new windows. The instant the
clause got into the Government offices, it was immeshed in a
very net of Red Tape. The Stamp Office, in its construction
of it, substituted existing occupiers, for existing houses ; into
the clause itself were introduced, before it became law, words,
confining this privilege to persons 'duly assessed for the year
ending 5th April 1835.' What followed? Red Tape made
the discovery that no one who took advantage of that clause,
and opened new windows, WAS duly assessed in 1835 — the
whole Government Assessment : made, be it remembered, by
Government Assessors: having been loosely and carelessly
made — and all those openers of new windows, upon the faith
of that plain speech of a plain gentleman, were surcharged;
to the increase of the revenue, the dishonour of the public
character of the country, and the very canonisation of Red
Tape.
For the collection and clear statement of these facts, we
are indebted to an excellent pamphlet reprinted, at the time,
from the Westminster Review. The facts and the subject
are worthy of one another.
0 give your public functionary, who delights in Red Tape,
a good social improvement to deal with 1 Let him come back
to his Tape-wits, after being frightened out of them, for a
little while, by the ravages of a Plague; and count, if you
can, the miles of Red Tape he will pile into barriers, against
— a General Interment Bill, say, or a Law for the suppres-
sion of infectious and disgusting nuisances! O the cables of
Red Tape he will coil away in dispatch boxes, the handcuff.0
lie will make of Red Tape to fetter useful hands; the inter-
minable perspectives of Exchequers, Woods and Forests, and
270 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
what not, all hung with Red Tape, up and down which he
will languidly wander, to the weariness of all whose hard
fate it is, to have to pursue him !
But, give him something to play with — give him a park
to slice away — a hideous scarecrow to set up in a public place,
where it may become the ludicrous horror of the civilised
earth — a marble arch to move — and who so brisk as he ! He
will rig you up a scaffolding with Red Tape, and fall to, joy-
fully. These are the things in which he finds relief from
unlucky Acts of Parliament that are more troublesome im-
provements than they were meant to be. Across and across
them, he can spin his little webs of Red Tape, and catch sum-
mer flies: or, near them, litter down official dozing-places, and
roll himself over and over in Red Tape,*like the Hippopota-
mus wallowing in his bath.
Once upon a time, there was a dusty dry old shop in Long
Acre, London, where, displayed in the windows, in tall slim
bottles, were numerous preparations, looking, at first sight,
like unhealthy maccaroni. On a nearer inspection these were
found to be Tapeworms, extracted from the internal mechan-
ism of certain ladies and gentlemen who were delicately re-
ferred to, on the bottles, by initial letters. Doctor Gard-
ner's medicine had effected these wonderful results; but, the
Doctor, probably apprehensive that his patients might 'blush
to find it fame,' enshrined them in his museum, under a thin
cloud of mystery. We have a lively remembrance of a white
basin, which, in the days of our boyhood, remained, for eight
or ten years, in a conspicuous part of the museum, and was
supposed to contain a specimen so recent that there had not
yet been time for its more elaborate preservation. It bore,
as we remember, the label, 'This singular creature, with ears
like a mouse, was last week found destroying the inside of
Mr. O— in the City Road.' But, this was an encroachment
on the province of the legitimate Tapeworms. That species
were all alike except in length. The smallest, according to
the labels, measured, to the best of our recollection, about two
hundred yards.
If, in any convenient part of the United Kingdom (we
*uggest the capital as the centre of resort), a similar museum
LITERATURE AND ART 271
could be established, for the destruction and exhibition of
the Red Tapeworms with which the British public are so
sorely afflicted, there can be no doubt that it would be, at
once, a vast national benefit, and a curious national spectacle.
Nor can there be a doubt that the people in general would
cheerfully contribute to the support of such an establish-
ment. The labels might be neatly and legibly written, ac-
cording to the precedent we have mentioned. 'The Right
Honourable Mr. X — from the Exchequer. Seven thousand
yards.' 'Earl Y — from the Colonial Office. Half as long
again.' 'Lord Z — from the Woods and Forests. The long-
est ever known.' 'This singular creature,' — not mentioning
its ears — 'was found destroying the patience of Mr. John
B — in the House of Commons.' If it were practicable to
open such an Institution before the departure of All Nations
(which can scarcely be hoped) it might be desirable to trans-
late these abstracts into a variety of languages, for the wider
understanding of one of our most agreeable and improving
sights.
THE GUILD OF LITERATURE AND ART
[MAY 10, 1851]
THERE are reasons, sufficiently obvious to our readers without
explanation, which render the present a fitting place for a
few words of remark on the proposed Institution bearing
this name.
Its objects, as stated in the public advertisement, are, 'to
encourage life assurance and other provident habits among
authors and artists : to render such assistance to both, as shall
never compromise their independence; and to found a new
Institution where honourable rest from arduous labour shall
still be associated with the discharge of congenial duties.'
The authors and artists associated in this endeavour would
be but indifferent students of human nature, and would be
but poorly qualified for the pursuit of their art, if they sup-
posed it possible to originate any scheme that would be free
272
from objection. They have neither the right, nor the desire,
to take offence at any discussion of the details of their plan.
All that they claim, is, such consideration for it as their
character and position may justly demand, and such mod-
erate restraint in regard of misconception or misrepresenta-
tion as is due to any body of gentlemen disinterestedly asso-
ciated for an honourable purpose.
It is proposed to form a Society of Authors and Artists
by profession, who shall all effect some kind of Insurance on
their lives; — whether for a hundred pounds or a thousand
pounds — whether on high premiums terminable at a certain
age, or on premiums payable through the whole of life —
whether for deferred annuities, or for pensions to widows,
or for the accumulation of sums destined to the education or
portioning of children — is in this, as in all other cases, at
the discretion of the individual insuring. The foundation
of a New Life Insurance Office, expressly for these pur-
poses, would be, obviously, a rash proceeding, wholly unjusti-
fiable in the infancy of such a design. Therefore its pro-
posers recommend one existing Insurance Office — firstly, be-
cause its constitution appears to secure to its insurers better
terms than they can meet with elsewhere; second!}*, because
in Life Insurance, as in most other things, a body of per-
sons can obtain advantages which individuals cannot. The
chief advantage thus obtained in this instance, is stated in the
printed Prospectus as a deduction of five per cent, from all
the premiums paid by Members of the Society to that par-
ticular office. It is needless to add, that if an author or an
artist be already insured in another office, or if he have any
peculiar liking, in effecting a new insurance, for paying five
per cent, more than he need, he is at perfect liberty to insure
where he pleases, and in right of any insurance whatever to
become a Member of the Society if he will.
But, there may be cases in which, on account of impaired
health or of advanced age at the present time, individuals
desirous of joining the Society, may be quite unable to obtain
acceptance at any Life Office. In such instances the required
qualification of Life Insurance will be dispensed with. In
cases of proved temporary inability to meet a periodical pay-
LITERATURE AND ART 273
ment due on an Insurance, the Society proposes to assist the
insurer from its funds.
'In connection with this Society,' the Prospectus proceeds,
'by which it is intended to commend and enforce the duties
of prudence and foresight, especially incumbent on those
whose income is wholly, or mainly, derived from the precari-
ous profit of a profession, it is proposed to establish and
endow an Institute, having at its disposal certain salaries,
to which certain duties will be attached ; together with a
limited number of free residences, which, though suffici-
ently small to be adapted to a very moderate income, will
be completed with due regard to the ordinary habits and
necessary comforts of gentlemen. The offices of Endowment
will consist:
'First, — Of a Warden, with a house and a salary of two
hundred pounds a year;
'Second, — Of Members, with a house and one hundred
and seventy pounds, or, without a house, two hundred pounds
a year ;
'Third, — Of Associates, with a salary of one hundred
pounds a year.
'For these offices all who are Insurers in the Society above
mentioned are qualified to offer themselves as Candidates.
Such Insurance is to be considered an indispensable qualifica-
tion, saving in exceptional cases (should any such arise)
M'here an individual can prove that he has made every effort
to insure his life, but cannot find acceptance at any Life
Office, by reason of impaired health, or of advanced age, at
the date of this prospectus.
'Each Member will be required to give, either personally
or by a proxy selected from the Associates, with the approval
of the Warden, three lectures in each year — one in London,
the others at the Mechanics' Institutes, or some public build-
ing suited for the purpose, in the principal provincial towns.
Considering the many duties exacting time and attention
that will devolve on the Warden, he will not be required to
give more than one lecture annually (which, if delivered by a
proxy, he will, health permitting, be expected to compose
himself), and that in the Metropolis.
274 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
'These lectures will be subject to the direction and control
of the managing body of the Endowment. They will usually
relate to Letters or Art, and will invariably avoid all debat-
able ground of Politics or Theology. It will be the
endeavour of the Committee to address them to points on
which the public may be presumed to be interested, and to
require dispassionate and reliable information — to make
them, in short, an educational and improving feature of
the time.
'The duties of Associates will be defined and fixed by the
Council (consisting of the Warden, the Members, and a cer-
tain number of the Associates themselves), according to the
previous studies and peculiar talent of each — whether in
gratuitous assistance to any learned bodies, societies for the
diffusion of knowledge, etc., or, as funds increase, and the
utilities of the Institution develop themselves, in co-operating
towards works of national interest and importance, but on
subjects of a nature more popular, and at a price more
accessible, than those which usually emanate from professed
academies. It is well to add, that while, on every account, it
is deemed desirable to annex to the receipt of a salary the
performance of a duty, it is not intended that such duty
should make so great a demand upon the time and labour,
either of Member or Associate, as to deprive the public of
their services in those departments in which they have gained
distinction, or to divert their own efforts for independence
from their accustomed professional pursuits.
'The design of the Institution proposed, is, to select for
the appointment of Members (who will be elected for life)
those Writers and Artists of established reputation, and
generally of mature years (or, if young, in failing health),
to whom the income attached to the appointment may be an
object of honourable desire; while the office of Associate is
intended partly for those whose toils or merits are less known
to the general public than their professional brethren, and
partly for those, in earlier life, who give promise of future
eminence, and to whom a temporary income of one hundred
pounds a year may be of essential and permanent service.
There are few men professionally engaged in Art or Letters,
LITERATURE AND ART 275
even though their labours may have raised them into com-
parative wealth, who cannot look back to some period of
struggle in which an income so humble would have saved
them from many a pang, and, perhaps, from the necessity
of stooping their ambition to occupations at variance with
the higher aims of their career.
'An Associate may, therefore, be chosen for life, or for one
or more years, according to the nature of his claims, and
the discretion of the Electors.'
With the view of bringing this project into general notice,
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (besides a gift of land) has writ-
ten a new comedy,1 and presented it to the friends associated
with him in the origination of the scheme. They will act
it, first, before Her Majesty at Devonshire House, and after-
wards publicly. Over and above the profits that may arise
from these dramatic representations, the copyright of the
comedy, both for acting and publishing, being uncondition-
ally given to the Association, has already enabled it to realise
a handsome sum of money.
Many of our readers are aware that this company of
amateur actors has been for some time in existence. Its pub-
lic existence was accidental. It was originally formed for
the private amusement of a leisure hour. Yielding to urgent
entreaty, it then had the good fortune to render service to the
Sanatorium, one of the most useful and most necessary Insti-
tutions ever founded in this country. It was subsequently
enabled to yield timely assistance to three distinguished
literary men, all of whom Her Majesty has since placed on
the Pension List, and entirely to support one of them for
nearly three years. It it now about to renew its exertions
for the cause we have set forth. To say that its members
do not merely seek their own entertainment and display
(easily attainable by far less troublesome and responsible
means) is to award them the not very exalted praise of being
neither fools nor impostors.
The Guild of Literature and Art may be a good name or
a bad name ; the details of this endowment — mere sugges-
tions at present, and not to be proceeded with, until much
i Not so Bad as we Seem.
276 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
work shall have been patiently done — may be perfect or most
imperfect ; the retirement proposed, may be taken for granted
to be everything that it is not intended to be; and still we
conceive the real question to remain untouched. It is,
whether Literature shall continue to be an exception from
all other professions and pursuits, in having no resource for
its distressed and divided followers but in eleemosynary aid;
or, whether it is good that they should be provident, united,
helpful of one another, and independent.
No child can suppose that the profits of the comedy alone
will be sufficient for such an Endowment as is sought to be
established. It is expressly stated in the Prospectus that
'for farther support to the Endowment by subscription, and
especially by annual subscription, it is intended to appeal to
the Public.' If the Public will disembarrass the question of
any little cobwebs that may be spun about it, and will con-
fine it to this, it will be faithful to its ever generous and
honest nature.
There is no reason for affecting to conceal that the
writer of these few remarks is active in the project, and is
impelled by a zealous desire to advance what he knows to be
a worthy object. He would be false to the trust placed
in him by the friends with whom he is associated, and to the
secret experience of his daily life, and of the calling to
which he belongs, if he had any dainty reserve in such a
matter. He is one of an order beyond which he affects to be
nothing, and aspires to be nothing. He knows — few men
can know, he thinks, with better reason — that he does his
duty to it in taking this part ; and he wishes his personal testi-
mony to tell for what it is worth.
THE FINISHING SCHOOLMASTER
[MAY 17, 1851]
IT was recently supposed and feared that a vacancy had
occurred in this great national office. One of the very few
THE FINISHING SCHOOLMASTER 277
public instructors — we had almost written the only one — as
to whose moral lessons all sorts of Administrations and
Cabinets are united in having no kind of doubt, was so much
engaged in enlightening the people of England, that an
occasion for his services arose, when it was dreaded they
could not be rendered. It is scarcely necessary to say who
this special public instructor is. Our administrative legisla-
tors cannot agree on the teaching of The Lord's Prayer,
the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian History ; but they
are all quite clear as to the public teaching of the Hangman.
The scaffold is the blessed neutral ground on which con-
flicting Governments may all accord, and Mr. John Ketch
is the great state Schoolmaster.
Maria Clarke was left for execution at Ipswich, Suffolk,
on Tuesday the 22nd of April. It was Easter Tuesday ;
and besides the decent compliment to the Festival of Easter
that may be supposed to be involved in a Public Execution
at that time, it was important that the woman should be
hanged upon a holiday, as so many country people were then
at leisure to profit by the improving spectacle. It happened,
however, that the great finishing Schoolmaster was pre-
engaged to lecture, that morning, to other pupils in another
part of the country, and thus a paragraph found its way
into the newspapers announcing that his humanising office
might, perhaps, be open for the nonce to competition.
A gentleman of the country, distinguished for his truth
and goodness, has placed in our hands copies of the letters
addressed to the Sheriff by the various candidates for this
post of instruction. We proceed to lay them before our
readers, as we have received them, without names or addresses.
In all other respects they are exact copies from the originals.
This is no jest, we beg it to be understood. The letters
we present, are literal transcripts of the letters written to the
High Sheriff of Suffolk, on the occasion in question.
The first, is in the form of a polite note, and has an air
of genteel commonplace — like an invitation, or an answer
to one.
278 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Mr> residing at Southwark will accept the
office unavoidably declined by Calcraft on Wednesday next viz
to execute Maria Clarke a speedy answer will oblige stating
terms say not less than £20.
To the High Sheriff of Suffolk.
The second, has a Pecksniffian morality in it, which is
very edifying.
Sir 20 April
This day i Was Reading the newspaper When i saw
the advertise for A hangman for that unfortunate Woman if
there is not A person come fored and and that you cannot Get
no one by the time i Will come as A suBstitute to finish that wich
the law require
Yours respect
fully
for the Govener of the
prepaid ipsWich Goal
Suffolk
The third, is respectful towards the great finishing School-
master, though — such is fame! — it mis-spells a name, with
which (as we have elsewhere observed) the public has become
familiarised.
Sir Saturday April 19/51
Seeing a statement in the Times of this day that you
wanted a person to execute Maria Clarke & you could not get a
substitute as Mr. Calcroft was engaged on Wednesday next if
well Paid I am Redey to do it myself an early communication
will oblige yours &c
P S. You must pay all expences Down as I am in Desperate
Circumstances hoping this is in secreecy I am
In the fourth, the writer modestly recommends himself as
a self-reliant trustworthy person.
Sir April th21/5l
having understood you Want a Man on Wednesday
Morning to Perform the Office Of hangman i beg most respect-
THE FINISHING SCHOOLMASTER 279
fully To Offer Myself to your Notice feeling Confident i Am
Abel to undertake it.
From your obedient
Servant No
Street Square
White Chappel
The fifth, appears to know his value as Public Instructor,
and Head of the National System of Education, if elected.
Southwark London
Mr. Sherriff April 20th 1851
Sir I will perform the duties of Hangman for the ex-
ecution of Maria Clarke on Wednesday in consideration of sixty
pounds for my services
Yours respectfully
to the High Sheriff of
Suffolk
on haste
to the
High Sheriff for the
County of Suffolk
p. paid Ipswhich
The sixth, is workmanlike.
Honoured Sir Deal. April 21/51
Understanding that you cannot get a man to take the
job of hanging the Woman on Wednesday next I will volunteer
to do the business if the terms are liberal and suit me
I remain your respected
Servant
The seventh, is also business-like, and is more particular.
The writer's mention of himself as a married man shows
considerable delicacy.
Sir lanchester April 19/51
Seeing the enclosed printed paper in the Newspaper
if it is a facte I am your man if your trums will suit me that
280 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
is what am I to have for the work and how am I to get there
I am yours &c
P S. my height is 5 feet 5 and my age is 32 years — and I
am a married man
The writer of the eighth is, we may infer from his tone
respecting the eminent 'Calcraft,' a Constant Reader.
To the Sheriff of Ipswitch
Sir April 20
Hearing that Calcraft is unable to attend on Wednes-
day next to execute Maria Clarke I offer myself as a substitute
being able and competent to fulfill his place on this occasion
upon the same terms as Calcraft if you think proper to engage
me a note addressed to me
will meet with immediate attention
Your humble Servant
The ninth, is cautious and decisive, though it evidently
proceeds from a Saxon, and is characteristically unjust to-
ward the only part of the earth which is in no way responsi-
ble for its own doings.
Honor'd Sir April 20th/ 51.
Seeing that you ware at present in some difficulty to
find an Executioner to perform your Duties on the person of
Maria Clarke whose execution is fixed for Wednesday next I
beg to offer to perform the office of hangsman on that occasion
for the sum of £50 to be paid on the completion of the same In
order to prevent the public from Knowing my real name and
address I shall request you to address to M. B. care of
should you accede to
my proposal an answer per return of Post will reach me on Tues-
day morning which will afford me time to make the Journey per
Rail
I of course shall expect my expences paid in addition to the
sum named
This is no idle offer as I shall most Certainly attend to per-
form the duties imposed on you, at the time required Should you
accept this offer
I have the Honor to be
Honord Sir
Your Obdt Servt
To the High Sheriff
of the County of Suffolk
P. S I of course expect the name to be kept a secret should
you not accept the offer And if the offer be accepted I shall
assume the name of Patrick Keley of Kildare Ireland
The tenth, as proceeding from an individual who is
honoured with the acquaintance of the real finishing School-
master, and who even aspires to succeed him, claims great
respect. If we selected any particular beauty from the rest,
it would be his mention of the post as a 'birth.'
Gentlemen April IQth, 1851
Seeing a paragraph in the paper of this day that you
are in want of an executioner in the place of Calcraft I have
taken the liberty to inform you that you can have me the writer
of this note I have been for some time after the birth and
am well acquainted with calcraft and I wonder he did not men-
tion my name when you dispatched a messenger to him I made
application at horsemonger lane for the last job there but Cal-
craft attended himself Gentlemen if you should think fit to
nominate me for the job, you will find me a fitt and proper per-
son to fufill it
An Answer to this application
will oblidge
Your most Humble Servant
And will meet with immediate attention
Gentea
Should this meet your approbation you will oblidge
by sending me instructions when and how to come down
You will be Kind enough to communicate this to the High
Sheriff' as soon as Convenient
To the Governer
of Ipswich Gaol
The connection of 'the sad office,' in the eleventh, with
'the amount,' unites a heart of sentiment with an eye to
business.
Cockermouth Apl 21 1851
Sir having seen in the paper that Calcraft cannot come up.
I will undertake the sad Office if well remunerated and as time
282 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
is short please to say the amount and I will come by return of
Post you may depend on me Yours.
This is the twelfth and last — from a plain man accustomed
to job-work.
Sir Wigan April 20 1851
Having seen in the Newspaper that you was in want
of a Man to oficiate in the place of Calcraft at the execution of
Maria Clarke if you will pay my expences from Wigan &
Back & 5 pounds for the job Please to send my expences from
Wigan to Ipswich & direct to the
& he will let me Know
Your obedient Servant
These letters, we repeat, are genuine. They may set our
readers thinking. It may be well to think a little now and
then, however distasteful it be to do so, of this public teach-
ing by the finishing Schoolmaster ; and to consider how often
he has at once begun and ended — and how long he should
continue to begin and end — the only State Education the
State can adjust to the perfect satisfaction of its con-
science.
A FEW CONVENTIONALITIES
[JUNE 28, 1851]
A CHILD inquired of us, the other day, why a gentleman
always said his first prayer in church, in the crown of his
hat. We were reduced to the ignominious necessity of
replying that we didn't know — but it was the custom.
Having dismissed our young friend with a severe coun-
tenance (which we always assume under the like circumstances
of discomfiture) we began to ask ourselves a few questions.
Our first list had a Parliamentary reference.
Why must an honourable gentleman always 'come down*
to tins house? Why can't he sometimes 'come up'— like a
horse— or 'come in' like a man? What does he mean by
A FEW CONVENTIONALITIES 283
invariably coming down? Is it indispensable that he should
'come down' to get into the House of Commons — say, for
instance, from Saint Albans? Or is that house on a lower
level than most other houses? Why is he always 'free to
confess'? It is well known that Britons never never never
will be slaves ; then why can't he say what he has to say,
without this superfluous assertion of his freedom? Why
must an Irish Member always 'taunt' the noble Lord with
this, that or the other? Can't he tell him of it civilly, or
accuse him of it plainly? Must he so ruthlessly taunt him?
Why does the Honourable Member for Groginhole call upon
the Secretary of State for the Home Department to 'lay
his hand upon his heart,' and proclaim to the country such
and such a thing? The Home Secretary is not in the habit
of laying his hand upon his heart. When he has any-
thing to proclaim to the country, he generally puts his
hands under his coat-tails. Why is he thus personally and
solemnly adjured to lay one of them on the left side of his
waistcoat for any Honourable Member's gratification? What
makes my Honourable friend, the Member for Gammonrife,
feel so acutely that he is required to 'pin his faith' upon the
measures of Her Majesty's Government? Is he always re-
quired to attach it in that particular manner only; and are
needle and thread, hooks and eyes, buttons, wafers, sealing-
wax, paste, bird-lime, gum, and glue, utterly prohibited to
him? Who invested the unfortunate Speaker with all the
wealth and poverty of the Empire, that he should be told —
'Sir, when you look around you, and behold your seas swarm-
ing with ships of every variety of tonnage and construction
— when you behold your flag waving over the forts of a
territory so vast that the Sun never sets upon it — when you
consider that your storehouses are teeming with the valuable
products of the earth — and when you reflect that millions
of your poor are held in the bonds of pauperism and ignor-
ance— can you, I ask, reconcile it to yourself; can you, I
demand, justify it to your conscience; can you, I inquire,
Sir, stifle the voice within you, by these selfish, these time-serv-
ing, these shallow, hollow, mockeries of legislation?' It is
really dreadful to have an innocent and worthy gentleman bul-
284 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
lied in this manner. Again, why do 'I hold in my hand' all
sorts of things? Can I never lay them down, or carry
them under my arm? There was a Fairy in the Arabian
Nights who could hold in her hand a pavilion large enough
to shelter the Sultan's army, but she could never have held
half the petitions, blue books, bills, reports, returns, volumes
of Hansard, and other miscellaneous papers, that a very
ordinary Member for a very ordinary place will hold in
his hands nowadays. Then again, how did it come to be
necessary to the Constitution that I should be such a very
circuitous and prolix peer as to 'take leave to remind you,
my Lords, of what fell from the noble and learned lord on
the opposite side of your Lordships' house, who preceded
my noble and learned friend on the cross Benches when
he addressed himself with so much ability to the observations
of the Right Reverend Prelate near me, in reference to
the measure now brought forward by the Noble Baron'-
when, all this time, I mean, and only want to say, Lord
Brougham? Is it impossible for my honourable friend the
Member for Drowsyshire, to wander through his few dreary
sentences immediately before the division, without premising
that 'at this late hour of the night and in this stage of
the debate,' etc.? Because if it be not impossible why does
he never do it? And why, why, above all, in either house
of Parliament must the English language be set to music —
bad und conventional beyond any parallel on earth — and
delivered, in a manner barely expressible to the eye as follows :
nigrht
Sir when I came do this house
ters
Minis
ty's
1 found Her jes
A FEW CONVENTIONALITIES 285
Is Parliament included in the Common Prayer-book under
the denomination of 'quires and places where they sing ' ?
And if so, wouldn't it be worth a small grant to make some
national arrangement for instruction in the art by Mr.
Hullah?
Then, consider the theatrical and operatic questions that
arise, likewise admitting of no solution whatever.
No man ever knew yet, no man ever will know, why
a stage-nobleman is bound to go to execution with a stride
and a stop alternately, and cannot proceed to the scaffold on
any other terms. It is not within the range of the loftiest
intellect to explain why a stage-letter, before it can be read
by the recipient, must be smartly rapped back, after being
opened, with the knuckles of one hand. It is utterly un-
known why choleric old gentlemen always have a trick of
carrying their canes behind them, between the waist-buttons
of their coat. Several persons are understood to be in
Bedlam at the present time, who went distracted in endeavour-
ing to reconcile the bran-new appearance of Mr. Cooper, in
John Bull bearing a highly polished surgical instrument-case
under his arm, with the fact of his having been just fished out
of the deep sea, in company with the case in question. In-
explicable phenomena continually arise at the Italian Opera,
where we have ourself beheld (it was in the time of Robert
of Normandy) Nuns buried in garments of that perplexing
nature that the very last thing one could possibly suppose
they had taken, was a veil of any order. Who knows how
it came about that the young Swiss maiden in the ballet
should, as an established custom, revolve, on her nuptial
morning, so airily and often, that at length she stands before
us, for some seconds, like a beautiful white muslin pen-wiper?
Why is her bed-chamber always immediately over the cottage-
door? Why is she always awakened by three taps of her
lover's hands? Why does her mother always spin? Why is
her residence invariably near a bridge? In what Swiss can-
ton do the hardy mountaineers pursue the chamois in silk
stockings, pumps, blue breeches, cherry-coloured bows, and
their shirt-sleeves? When the Tenor Prince is made more
tenor by the near approach of death from steel or poison ;
286 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
when the Bass enemy growls glutted vengeance; and the
Heroine (who was so glad in the beginning of her story to
see the villagers that she had an irrepressible impulse to be
always shaking hands with them) is rushing to and fro
among the living and disturbing the wig of the dead: why
do we always murmur our Bra — a — avo! or our Bra — a
— aval as the case may be, in exactly the same tone, at
exactly the same places, and execute our little audience con-
ventionalities with the punctuality and mechanism of the
stage itself? Why does the Prime Buffo always rub his
hands and tap his nose? When did mankind enter into
articles of agreement that a most uncompromising and un-
comfortable box, with the lid at a certain angle, should be
called a mossy bank? Who first established an indissoluble
connection between the Demon and the brass instruments?
When the sailors become Bacchanalian, how do they do it out
of such little mugs, replenished from pitchers that have always
been turned upside down? Granted that the Count must go
a-hunting, why must he therefore wear fur round the tops
of his boots, and never follow the chase with any other
weapon than a spear with a large round knob at the
blunt end?
Then, at public dinners and meetings, why must Mr.
Wilson refer to Mr. Jackson as 'my honourable friend, if he
will permit me to call him so'? Has Wilson any doubt about
it? Why does Mr. Smithers say that he is sensible he has
already detained you too long, and why you say, 'No, no ; go
on!* when you know you are sorry for it directly afterwards?
You are not taken by surprise when the Toastmaster cries, in
giving the Army and Navy, 'Upstanding, gentlemen, and
good fires' — then what do you laugh for? No man could
ever say why he was greatly refreshed and fortified by forms
of words, as 'Resolved. That this meeting respectfully but
firmly views with sorrow and apprehension, not unmixed with
abhorrence and dismay' — but they do invigorate the patient,
in most cases, like a cordial. It is a strange thing that the
chairman is obliged to refer to 'the present occasion' ; — that
there is a horrible fascination in the phrase which he can't
tlude. Also, that there should be an unctuous smack and
A FEW CONVENTIONALITIES 287
relish in the enunciation of titles, as 'And I may be permitted
to inform this company that when I had the honour of wait-
ing on His Royal Highness, to ask His Royal Highness to be
pleased to bestow his gracious patronage on our excellent
Institution, His Royal Highness did me the honour to reply,
with that condescension w?hich is ever His Royal Highness's
most distinguishing characteristic' — and so forth. As to the
singular circumstance that such and such a duty should not
have been entrusted to abler hands than mine, everybody is
familiar with that phenomenon, but it 's very strange that it
must be so !
Again, in social matters. It is all very well to wonder
who invents slang phrases, referential to Mr. Ferguson or
any such mythological personage, but the wonder does not
stop there. It extends into Belgravia. Saint James's has
its slang, and a great deal of it. Nobody knows who first
drawled, languidly, that so and so, or such and such a thing,
was 'good fun,' or 'capital fun,' or 'a — the best fun in the
world, I 'm told' — but some fine gentleman or lady did so, and
accordingly a thousand do. They don't know why. We
have the same mysterious authority for inquiring, in our
faint way, if Cawberry is a nice person — if he is a superior
person — for a romance being so charmingly horrible, or a
woman so charmingly ugly — for the Hippopotamus being
quite charming in his bath, and the little Elephant so charm-
ingly like its mother — for the glass palace being (do you
know) so charming to me that I absolutely bore every crea-
ture with it — for those horrid sparrows not having built in
the dear gutters, which are so charmingly ingenious — for a
great deal more, to the same very charming purpose.
When the old stage-coaches ran, and overturns took place
in which all the passengers were killed or crippled, why was
it invariably understood that no blame whatever was attribut-
able to the coachman? In railway accidents of the present
day, why is the coroner always convinced that a searching
inquiry must be made, and that the railway authorities are
affording every possible facility in aid of the elucidation of
this unhappy disaster? When a new building tumbles into
a heap of ruins, why are architect, contractor, and materials
288 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
always the best that could be got for money, with additional
precautions — as if that splendid termination were the
triumph of construction, and all buildings that don't tumble
down were failures? When a boiler bursts, why was it the
very best of boilers ; and why, when somebody thinks that if
the accident were not the boiler's fault it is likely to have
been the engineer's, is the engineer then morally certain to
have been the steadiest and skilfullest of men? If a public
servant be impeached, how does it happen that there never
was such an excellent public servant as he will be shown to
be by Red-Tape-osophy ? If an abuse be brought to light,
how does it come to pass that it is sure to be, in fact, (if
rightly viewed) a blessing? How can it be, that we have
gone on, for so many years, surrounding the grave with
ghastly, ruinous, incongruous and inexplicable mummeries,
and curtaining the cradle with a thousand ridiculous and pre-
judicial customs?
All these things are conventionalities. It would be well
for us if there were no more and no worse in common use.
But, having run the gauntlet of so many, in a breath, we
must yield to the unconventional necessity of taking breath,
and stop here.
A NARRATIVE OF EXTRAORDINARY
SUFFERING
[JULY 12,1851]
A GENTLEMAN of credit and of average ability, whose name
we have permission to publish — Mr. Lost, of the Maze, Ware
—was recently desirous to make a certain journey in Eng-
land. Previous to entering on this excursion, which we
believe had a commercial object (though Mr. Lost has for
some years retired from business as a Woolstapler, having
been succeeded in 1831 by his son who now carries on the firm
of Lost and Lost, in the old-established premises at Stratford.
on Avon, Warwickshire, where it may be interesting to our
readers to know that he married, in 1834, a Miss Shakespeare,
EXTRAORDINARY SUFFERING 289
supposed to be a lineal descendant of the immortal bard), it
was necessary that Mr. Lost should come to London, to
adjust some unsettled accounts with a merchant in the
Borough, arising out of a transaction in Hops. His Diary
originating on the day previous to his leaving home is before
us, and we shall present its rather voluminous information to
our readers in a condensed form: endeavouring to extract its
essence only.
It would appear that Mrs. Lost had a decided objection to
her husband's undertaking the journey in question. She
observed, 'that he had much better stay at home, and not go
and make a fool of himself — which she seems to have had a
strong presentiment that he would ultimately do. A young
person in their employ as confidential domestic, also protested
against his intention, remarking 'that Master warn't the man
as was fit for Railways, and Railways warn't the spearses as
was fit for Master.' Mr. Lost, however, adhering to his pur-
pose, in spite of these dissuasions, Mrs. Lost made no effort
(as she might easily have done with perfect success) to
restrain him by force. But, she stipulated with Mr. Lost,
that he should purchase an Assurance Ticket of the Railway
Passengers' Assurance Company, entitling his representatives
to three thousand pounds in case of the worst. It was also
understood that in the event of his failing to write home by
any single night's post, he would be advertised in the Times,
at full length, next day.
These satisfactory preliminaries concluded, Mr. Lost sent
out the confidential domestic (Mary Anne Mag by name, and
born of poor but honest parents) to purchase a Railway
Guide. This document was the first shock in connection with
his extraordinary journey which Mr. Lost and family re-
ceived. For, on referring to the Index, to ascertain how
Ware stood in reference to the Railways of the United King-
dom and the Principality of Wales, they encountered the fol-
lowing mysterious characters : —
WAEETU .... >, * • 6
No farther information could be obtained. They thought
290 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
of page six, but there was no such page in the book, which
had the sportive eccentricity of beginning at page eight. In
desperate remembrance of the dark monosyllable Tu, they
turned to the 'classification of Railways,' but found nothing
there under the letter T except 'Taff Vale and Aberdare'-
and who (as the confidential domestic said) could ever want
them! Mr. Lost has placed it on record that his 'brain
reeled' when he glanced down the page, and found himself,
in search of Ware, wandering among such names as Raven-
glass, Bootle and Sprouston.
Reduced to the necessity of proceeding to London by
turnpike-road, Mr. Lost made the best of his way to the
metropolis in his own one-horse chaise, which he then dis-
missed in charge of his man, George Flay, who had accom-
panied him for that purpose. Proceeding to Southwark, he
had the satisfaction of finding that the total of his loss upon
the Hop transaction did not exceed three hundred and forty-
seven pounds, four shillings, and twopence halfpenny.
This, he justly regarded as, on the whole, a success for an
amateur in that promising branch of speculation ; in com-
memoration of his good fortune, he gave a plain but substan-
tial dinner to the Hop Merchant and two friends at Tom's
Coffee House on Ludgate Hill.
He did not sleep at that house of entertainment, but
repaired in a hackney cab (No. 482) to the Euston Hotel,
adjoining the terminus of the North-Western Railway. On
the following morning his remarkable adventures may be con-
sidered to have commenced.
It appears that with a view to the farther prosecution of
Iiis contemplated journey, it was, in the first place, necessary
for Mr. Lost to make for the ancient city of Worcester.
Knowing that place to be attainable by way of Birmingham,
he started by the train at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and
proceeded, pleasantly and at an even pace, to Leighton.
Here he found, to his great amazement, a powerful black bar
drawn across the road, hopelessly impeding his progress !
After some consideration, during which, as he informs us,
his 'brain reeled' again, Mr. Lost returned to London. Hav-
ing partaken of some refreshment, and endeavoured to com-
291
pose his mind with sleep (from which, however, he describes
himself to have derived but little comfort, in consequence of
being fitfully pursued by the mystic signs WARE Tu 6), he
awoke unrefreshed, and at five minutes past five in the after-
noon once again set forth in quest of Birmingham. But
now, he was even less fortunate than in the morning ; for, on
arriving at Tring, some ten miles short of his former place
of stoppage, he suddenly found the dreaded black barrier
across the road, and was thus warned by an insane voice,
which seemed to have something supernatural in its awful
sound. 'RUGBY, TO LEICESTER, NOTTINGHAM, AND DERBY!'
With the spirit of an Englishman, Mr. Lost absolutely
refused to proceed to either of those towns. If such were the
meaning of the voice, it fell powerless upon him. Why
should he go to Leicester, Nottingham, and Derby ; and what
right had Rugby to interfere with him at Tring? He again
returned to London, and, fearing that his mind was going,
took the precaution of being bled.
When he arose on the following morning, it was with a
haggard countenance, on which the most indifferent observer
might have seen the traces of a corroding anxiety, and where
the practised eye might have easily detected what was really
wrong within. Even conscience does not sear like mystery.
Where now were the glowing cheek, the double chin, the mel-
low nose, the dancing eye? Fled. And in their place —
In the silent watches of the night, he had formed the«
resolution of endeavouring to reach the object of his pursuit,
by Gloucester, on the Great-Western Railway. Leaving
London once more, this time at half an hour after twelve at
noon, he proceeded to Swindon Junction. Not without diffi-
culty. For, at Didcot, he again found the black barrier
across the road, and was violently conducted to seven places,
with none of which he had the least concern — in particular,
to one dreadful spot with the savage appellation of Aynho.
But, escaping from these hostile towns after undergoing a
variety of hardships, he arrived (as has been said) at Swin-
don Junction.
Here, all hope appeared to desert him. It was evident that
the whole country was in a state of barricade, and that the
292
insurgents (whoever they were) had taken their measures but
too well. His imprisonment was of the severest kind. Tor-
tures were applied, to induce him to go to Bath, to Bristol,
Yatton, Clevedon Junction, Weston-super-Mare Junction,
Exeter, Torquay, Plymouth, Falmouth, and the remotest fast-
nesses of West Cornwall. No chance of Gloucester was held
out to him for a moment. Remaining firm, however, and
watching his opportunity, he at length escaped — more by the
aid of good fortune, he considers, than through his own exer-
tions— and sliding underneath the dreaded barrier, departed
by way of Cheltenham for Gloucester.
And now indeed he might have thought that after com-
bating with so many obstacles, and undergoing perils so
extreme, his way at length lay clear before him, and a ray of
sunshine fell upon his dismal path. The delusive hope, if
any such were entertained by the forlorn man, was soon dis-
pelled. It was his horrible fate to depart from Cirencester
exactly an hour before he arrived there, and to leave Glouces-
ter ten minutes before he got to it !
It were vain to endeavour to describe the condition to which
Mr. Lost was reduced by this overwhelming culmination of
his many hardships. It had been no light shock to find his
native country in the hands of a nameless foe, cutting off
the communication between one town and another, and carry-
ing out a system of barricade, little if at all inferior, in
strength and skill, to the fortification of Gibraltar. It had
been no light shock to be addressed by maniac voices urging
him to fly to various remote parts of the kingdom. But, this
tremendous blow, the annihilation of time, the stupen-
dous reversal of the natural sequence and order of things, was
too much for his endurance — too much, perhaps, for the en-
durance of humanity. He quailed beneath it, and became
insensible.
When consciousness returned, he found himself again on the
North-Western line of Railway, listlessly travelling any-
where. He remembers, he says, Four Ashes, Spread Eagle,
and Penk ridge. They were black, he thinks, and coaly. He
had no business there ; he didn't care whether he was there or
not. He knew where he wanted to go, and he knew he
EXTRAORDINARY SUFFERING 293
couldn't go where he wanted. He was taken to Manchester,
Bangor, Liverpool, Windermere, Dundee and Montrose,
Edinburgh and Glasglow. He repeatedly found himself in
the Isle of Man ; believes he was, several times, all over
Wales ; knows he was at Kingstown and Dublin, but has only
a general idea how he got there. Once, when he thought he
was going his own way at last, he was dropped at a North
Staffordshire Station called (he thinks in mockery) Mow
Cop. As a general rule he observed that whatsoever diverg-
ence he made, he came to Edinburgh. But, there were excep-
tions— as when he was set down on the extreme verge of land
at Holyhead, or put aboard a Steamboat and carried by way
of Paris into the heart of France. He thinks the most
remarkable journey he was made to take, was from Euston
Square into Northamptonshire ; so, by the fens of Lincoln-
shire round to Rugby ; thence, through the whole of the
North of England and a considerable part of Scotland, to
Liverpool ; thence, to Douglas in the Isle of Man ; and back,
by way of Ireland, Wales, Great Yarmouth, and Bishop
Stortford, to Windsor Castle. Throughout the whole of
these travels, he observed the black-barrier system in active
operation, and was always stopped when he least expected it.
He invariably travelled against his will, and found a code of
cabalistic signs in use all over the country.
Anxiety and disappointment had now produced their
natural results. His face was wan, his voice much weakened,
his hair scanty and grey, the whole man expressive of fatigue
and endurance. It is an affecting instance of the influence
of uneasiness and depression on the mind of Mr. Lost, that
he now commenced wildly to seek the object of his journey
in the strangest directions. Abandoning the Railroads on
which he had undergone so much, he began to institute a
feverish inquiry for it among a host of boarding-houses and
hotels. 'Bed, breakfast, boots, and attendance, two and six-
pence per day.' — 'Bed and boots, seven shillings per week.' —
'Wines and spirits of the choicest quality.' — 'Night Porter in
constant attendance.' — 'For night arrivals, ring the private
door bell.'- — 'Omnibuses to and from all parts of London,
every minute.' — 'Do not confound this house with any other
294 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
of the same name.' Among such addresses to the public, did
Mr. Lost now seek for a way to Worcester. As he might
have anticipated — as he did anticipate in fact, for he was
hopeless now— it was not to be found there. His intellect
was greatly shaken.
Mr. Lost has left, in his Diary, a record so minute of the
gradual deadening of his intelligence and benumbing of his
faculties, that he can be followed downward, as it were step
by step. Thus, we find that when he had exhausted the
boarding-houses and hotels, family, commercial and otherwise
(in which he found his intellect much enfeebled by the con-
stant recurrence of the hieroglyphic *1 — 6 — 51 — W. J. A.'),
he addressed himself, with the same dismal object, to Messrs.
Moses and Son, and to Mr. Medwin, bootmaker to His Royal
Highness Prince Albert. After them, even to inanimate
things, as the Patent Compendium Portmanteau, the im-
proved Chaff Machines and Corn Crushers, the Norman
Razor, the Bank of England Sealing Wax, Schweepe's Soda
Water, the Extract of Sarsaparilla, the Registered Paletot,
Rowland's Kalydor, the Cycloidal Parasol, the Cough
Lozenges, the universal night-light, the poncho, Allsopp's
pale ale, and the patent knife-cleaner. Failing, naturally,
in all these appeals, and in a final address to His Grace the
Duke of Wellington in the gentlemanly summer garment,
and to Mr. Burton of the General Furnishing Ironmongery
Warehouse, he sank into a stupor, and abandoned hope.
Mr. Lost is now a ruin. He is at the Euston Square
Hotel. When advised to return home he merely shakes his
head and mutters 'Ware Tu . . 6.' No Cabman can be
found who will take charge of him on those instructions. He
sits continually turning over the leaves of a small, dog's-eared
quarto volume with a yellow cover, and babbling in a plain-
tive voice, BRADSHAW, BRADSHAW.'
A few days since, Mrs. Lost, having been cautiously made
acquainted with his condition, arrived at the hotel, accom-
panied by the confidential domestic. The first words of the
heroic woman were:
'John Lost, don't make a spectacle of yourself, don't.
Who am I?>
EXTRAORDINARY SUFFERING 295
He replied 'BRADSHAW.'
'John Lost,' said Mrs. Lost, 'I have no patience with you.
Where have you been to?'
Fluttering the leaves of the book, he answered 'To BRAD-
SHAW.'
'Stuff and nonsense you tiresome man,' said Mrs. Lost.
'You put me out of patience. What on earth has brought
you to this stupid state?'
He feebly answered, 'BRADSHAW.'
No one knows what he means.
WHOLE HOGS
[AUGUST 23, 1851]
THE public market has been of late more than usually re-
markable for transactions on the American principle in Whole
and indivisible Hogs. The market has been heavy — not the
least approach to briskness having been observed in any part
of it ; but, the transactions, such as they have been, have been
exclusively for Whole Hogs. Those who may only have had
a retail inclination for sides, ribs, limbs, cheeks, face, trotters,
snout, ears, or tail, have been required to take the Whole Hog,
sinking none of the offal, but consenting to it all — and a
good deal of it too.
It has been discovered that mankind at large can only be
regenerated by a Teetotal Society, or by a Peace Society, or
by always dining on vegetables. It is to be particularly re-
marked that either of these certain means of regeneration is
utterly defeated, if so much as a hair's-breadth of the tip of
either ear of that particular Pig be left out of the bargain.
Qualify your water with a teaspoonful of wine or brandy —
we beg pardon — alcohol — and there is no virtue in Temper-
ance. Maintain a single sentry at the gate of the Queen'?
Palace, and it is utterly impossible that you can be peaceful.
Stew so much as the bone of a mutton chop in the pot with
your vegetables, and you will never make another Eden out
of a Kitchen Garden. You must take the Whole Hog, Sirt
296 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and every bristle on him, or you and the rest of mankind will
never be regenerated.
Now, without inquiring at present whether means of re-
generation that are so easily spoiled, may not a little resemble
the pair of dancing-shoes in the story, which the lady de-
stroyed by walking across a room in them, we will consider
the Whole Hog question from another point of view.
First, stand aside to see the great Teetotal Procession come
by. It is called a Temperance Procession — which is not an
honest use of a plain word, but never mind that. Hurrah !
hurrah ! The flags are blue and the letters golden. Hurrah !
hurrah! Here are a great many excellent, straightforward,
thoroughly well-meaning, and exemplary people, four and
four, or two and two. Hurrah ! hurrah ! Here are a great
many children, also four and four, or two and two. Who
are they? — They, Sir, are the Juvenile Temperance Bands
of Hope. — Lord bless me! What are the Juvenile Temper-
ance Bands of Hope? — They are the Infantine Brigade of
Regenerators of Mankind. — Indeed? Hurrah! hurrah!
These young citizens being pledged to total abstinence, and
being fully competent to pledge themselves to anything for
life; and it being the custom of such young citizens' parents,
in the existing state of unregenerated society, to bring them
up on ardent spirits and strong beer (both of which are
commonly kept in Barrels, behind the door, on tap, in all
large families, expressly for persons of tender years, of whom
it is calculated that seven-eighths always go to bed drunk) ;
this is a grand show. So, again, Hurrah ! hurrah !
Who are these gentlemen walking two and two, with medals
on their stomachs and bows in their button-holes? These,
Sir, are the Committee. — Are they? Hurrah! hurrah! One
cheer more for the Committee ! Hoo-o-o-o-rah ! A cheer for
the Reverend Jabez Fireworks — fond of speaking; a cheer
for the gentleman with the stand-up collar, Mr. Gloss — fond
of speaking; a cheer for the gentleman with the massive
watch-chain, who smiles so sweetly on the surrounding Fair,
Mr. Glib — fond of speaking; a cheer for the rather dirty
little gentleman who look? like a converted Hyaena, Mr. Scrad-
WHOLE HOGS
ger — fond of speaking; a cheer for the dark-eyed, brown
gentleman, the Dove Delegate from America — fond of speak-
ing; a cheer for the swarm who follow, blackening the pro-
cession,— Regenerators from everywhere in general — all good
men — all fond of speaking ; and all going to speak.
I have no right to object, I am sure. Hurrah, hurrah!
The Reverend Jabez Fireworks, and the great Mr. Gloss,
and the popular Mr. Glib, and the eminent Mr. Scradger,
and the Dove Delegate from America, and the distinguished
swarm from everywhere, have ample opportunity (and profit
by it, too) for speaking to their heart's content. For is
there not, to-day, a Grand Demonstration Meeting; and to-
morrow, another Grand Demonstration Meeting; and, the
day after to-morrow, a Grand United Regenerative Zoologi-
cal Visitation ; and, the day after that, a Grand Aggregate
General Demonstration ; and, the day after that, a Grand
Associated Regenerative Breakfast ; and, the day after that,
a Grand Associated Regenerative Tea ; and, the day after
that, a Final Grand Aggregate Compounded United and As-
sociated Steamboat River Demonstration ; and do the Regen-
erators go anywhere without speaking, by the bushel? Still,
what offence to me? None. Still, I am content to cry,
Hurrah ! hurrah ! If the Regenerators, though estimable
men, be the most tiresome men (as speakers) under Heaven;
if their sincerest and best followers cannot, in the infirmity of
human nature, bear the infliction of such oratory, but occupy
themselves in preference with tea and rolls, or resort for com-
fort to the less terrible society of Lions, Elephants, and
Bears, or drown the Regenerative eloquence in the clash of
brazen Bands ; I think it sensible and right and still exclaim,
Hurrah !
But how, if with the matter of such eloquence, when any
of it happens to be heard, and also happens not to be a
singular compound of references to the Bible, and selections
from Joe Miller, I find, on drawing nearer, that I have some
business? How, if I find that the distinguished swarm are
not of that quiet class of gentlemen whom Mr. Carlyle de-
scribes as consuming their own smoke; but that they emit a
298 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
vast amount of smoke, and blacken their neighbours very con-
siderably? Then, as a neighbour myself, I have perhaps a
right to speak.
In Bedlam, and in all other madhouses, Society is denounced
as being wrongfully combined against the patient. In New-
gate, and in all other prisons, Society is denounced as being
wrongfully combined against the criminal. In the speeches
of the Reverend Jabez, and the other Regenerators, Society
is denounced as being wrongfully and wickedly combined
against their own particular Whole Hog — who must be swal-
lowed, every bristle, or there is no Pork in him.
The proof? Society won't come in and sign the pledge;
Society won't come in and recruit the Juvenile Temperance
bands of hope. Therefore, Society is fond of drunkenness,
sees no harm in it, favours it very much, is a drunkard — a
base, worthless, sensual, profligate brute. Fathers and
mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, divines,
physicians, lawyers, editors, authors, painters, poets, musi-
cians, Queen, lords, ladies, and commons, are all in league
against the Regenerators, are all violently attached to drunk-
enness, are all the more dangerous if by any chance they be
personal examples of temperance, in the real meaning of the
word! — which last powerful steam-hammer of logic has be-
come a pet one, and is constantly to be observed in action.
Against this sweeping misrepresentation, I take the liberty
of entering my feeble protest. With all respect for Jabez,
for Gloss, for Glib, for Dove Delegate, and for Scradger, I
must make so bold as to observe that when a Malay runs amuck
he cannot be considered in a temperate state of mind ; also,
that when a thermometer stands at Fever Heat, it cannot
claim to indicate Temperate weather. A man, to be truly
temperate, must be temperate in many respects — in the re-
jection of strong words no less than of strong drinks — and
I crave leave to assert against my good friends the Regen-
erators, that in such gross statements, they set a most intem-
perate example. I even doubt whether an equal number of
drunkards, under the excitement of the strongest liquors, could
set a worse example.
And I would beg to put it seriously to the consideration of
WHOLE HOGS 299
those who have sufficient powers of endurance to stand about
the platform, listening, whether they think of this sufficiently ?
Whether they ever knew the like of this before? Whether
they have any experience or knowledge of a good cause that
was ever promoted by such bad means? Whether they ever
heard of an association of people, deliberately, by their chosen
vessels, throwing overboard every effort but their own, made
for the amelioration of the condition of men ; unscrupulously
vilifying all other labourers in the vineyard; calumniously
setting down as aiders and abettors of an odious vice which
they know to be held in general abhorrence, and consigned
to general shame, the great compact mass of the community
— of its intelligence, of its morality, of its earnest endeavour
after better things? If, upon consideration, they know of no
such other case, then the inquiry will perhaps occur to them,
whether, in supporting a so-conducted cause, they really be
upholders of Temperance, dealing with words, which should
be the signs for Truth, according to the truth that is in
them ?
Mankind can only be regenerated, proclaim the fatteners
of the Whole Hog Number Two, by means of a Peace So-
ciety. Well ! I call out of the nearest Peace Society my
worthy friend John Bates — an excellent workman and a sound
man, lineally descended from that sturdy soldier of the same
name who spake with King Henry the Fifth, on the night
before the battle of Agincourt. 'Bates,' says I, 'how about
this Regeneration? Why can it only be effected by means
of a Peace Society?* Says Bates in answer, 'Because War
is frightful, ruinous, and unchristian. Because the details of
one battle, because the horrors of one siege, would so appal
you, if you knew them, that probably you never could be
happy afterwards. Because man was not created in the
image of his Maker to be blasted with gunpowder, or pierced
with bayonets, or gashed with swords, or trampled under iron
hoofs of horses, into a puddle of mire and blood. Because
War is a wickedness that always costs us dear. Because it
wastes our treasure, hardens our hearts, paralyses our indus-
try, cripples our commerce, occasions losses, ills, and devilish
crimes, unspeakable and out of number.' Says I, sadly, 'But
300 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
have I not, O Bates, known all this for this many a year?' 'It
may be so,' says Bates; 'then come into the Peace Society.'
Says I, 'Why come in there, Bates?' Says Bates, 'Because we
declare we won't have War or show of War. We won't have
armies, navies, camps, or ships. England shall be disarmed,
we say, and all these horrors ended.' Says I, 'How ended,
Bates?' Says Bates, 'By arbitration. We have a Dove Del-
egate from America, and a Mouse Delegate from France ; and
we are establishing a Bond of Brotherhood, and that '11 do
it.' 'Alas! It will NOT do it, Bates. I, too, have thought
upon the horrors of war, of the blessings of peace, and of
the fatal distraction of men's minds from seeking them, by
the roll of the drum and the thunder of the inexorable cannon.
However, Bates, the world is not so far upon its course, yet,
but that there are tyrants and oppressors left upon it, watch-
ful to find Freedom weak that they may strike, and backed
by great armies. O John Bates, look out towards Austria,
look out towards Russia, look out towards Germany, look out
towards the purple Sea, that lies so beautiful and calm beyond
the filthy jails of Naples ! Do you see nothing there?' Says
Bates (like the sister in Blue Beard, but much more triumph-
antly) 'I see nothing there, but dust' ; — and this is one of the
inconveniences of a fattened Whole and indivisible Hog, that
it fills up the doorway, and its breeders cannot see beyond
it. 'Dust !' says Bates. I tell Bates that it is because there
are, behind that dust, oppressors and oppressed, arrayed
against each other — that it is because there are, beyond his
Dove Delegate and his Mouse Delegate, the wild beasts of the
Forest — that it is because I dread and hate the miseries of
tyranny and war — that it is because I would not be soldier-
ridden, nor have other men so — that I am not for the dis-
arming of England, and cannot be a member of his Peace
Society: admitting all his premises, but denying his conclu-
sion. Whereupon Bates, otherwise just and sensible, insinu-
ates that not being for his Whole and indivisible Hog, I can
be for no part of his Hog; and that I have never felt or
thought what his Society now tells me it, and only it, feels
and thinks as a new discovery ; and that when I am told of the
new discovery I don't care for it !
WHOLE HOGS 301
Mankind can only be regenerated by dining on Vegetables.
Why? Certain worthy gentlemen have dined, it seems, on
vegetables for ever so many years, and are none the worse for
it. Straightway, these excellent men, excited to the highest
pitch, announce themselves by public advertisement as 'DIS-
TINGUISHED VEGETARIANS,' vault upon a platform, hold a veg-
etable festival, and proceed to show, not without prolixity
and weak jokes, that a vegetable diet is the only true faith,
and that, in eating meat, mankind is wholly mistaken and par-
tially corrupt. Distinguished Vegetarians. As the men who
wear Nankeen trousers might hold a similar meeting, and
become Distinguished Nankeenarians ! But am I to have NO
meat? If I take a pledge to eat three cauliflowers daily in
the cauliflower season, a peck of peas daily in the pea time,
a gallon of broad Windsor beans daily when beans are 'in,'
and a young cabbage or so every morning before breakfast,
with perhaps a little ginger between meals (as a vegetable
substance, corrective of that windy diet), may I not be
allowed half an ounce of gravy-beef to flavour my potatoes?
Not a shred? Distinguished Vegetarians can acknowledge
no imperfect animal. Their Hog must be a Whole Hog,
according to the fashion of the time.
Now, we would so far renew the custom of sacrificing ani-
mals, as to recommend that an altar be erected to Our Coun-
try, at present sheltering so many of these very inconvenient
and unwieldy Hogs, on which their grosser portions should be
'burnt and purged away.' The Whole Hog of the Temper-
ance Movement, divested of its intemperate assumption of
infallibility and of its intemperate determination to run
grunting at the legs of the general population of this em-
pire, would be far less unclean and a far more serviceable
creature than at present. The Whole Hog of the Peace So-
ciety, acquiring the recognition of a community of feeling
between itself and many who hold war in no less abhorrence,
but who yet believe, that, in the present era of the world, some
preparation against it is a preservative of peace and a re-
straint upon despotism, would become as much enlightened
as its learned predecessor Toby, of Immortal Memory. And
if distinguished Vegetarians, of all kinds, would only allow a
302 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
little meat ; and if distinguished Flesh-meatarians, of all kinds,
would only yield a little vegetable ; if the former, quietly de-
vouring the fruits of the earth to any extent, would admit
the possible morality of mashed potatoes with beef — and if
the latter would concede a little spinach with gammon ; and
if both could manage to get on with a little less platforming
there being at present rather an undue preponderance of
cry over wool — if all of us, in short, were to yield up some-
thing of our whole and entire animals, it might be very much
the better in the end, both for us and for them.
After all, my friends and brothers, even the best Whole
and indivisible Hog may be but a small fragment of the higher
and greater work, called Education!
[NOVEMBER 8, 1851]
As we both preach and practise Temperance according to the
English signification of the word, and as we have lately ob-
served with ashes on our head that one or two respected
models of that virtue have been thrown into an ill-humour by
our paper on Whole Hogs, we trust they will be soothed by
their present reference to the milder and gentler class of
swine: which may become Whole Hogs if they live, but which
we fear are but a measly description of Pork, extremely likely
to be cut off in their Bloom.
The accidental use of the foregoing flowery expression,
brings us to the subject of our present observations: namely,
that last tender and innocent offspring of Whole Hogs, on
which has been bestowed the name of BLOOMERISM.
It is a confession of our ignorance which we make with
feelings of humiliation, but when the existence of this little
porker first became known to us, we supposed its name to have
been conferred upon it in right of its fresh and gushing
nature. We have since learnt, not without impressions of
solemnity, that it is admiration's tribute to 'Mrs. Colonel
Bloomer,* of the United States of America. What visions
SUCKING PIGS 303
rise upon our mind's eye, as our fancy contemplates that
eminent lady, and the Colonel in whose home she is a well-
spring of joy, we will here make no ineffectual endeavour to
describe.
Neither will we enter upon the great question of the Rights
of Women; whether Majors, Captains, Lieutenants, Ensigns,
Non-commissioned Officers, or Privates, under Mrs. Colonel
Bloomer; or members of any other corps. Personally, we
admit that our mind would be disturbed, if our own domestic
well-spring were to consider it necessary to entrench herself
behind a small table ornamented with a water-bottle and tum-
bler, and from that fortified position to hold forth to the
public. Similarly, we should doubt the expediency of her
putting up for Marylebone, or being one of the Board of
Guardians for St. Pancras, or serving on a Grand Jury for
Middlesex, or acting as High Sheriff of any county, or taking
the chair at a Meeting on the subject of the Income-Tax.
We think it likely that we might be a little discomfited, if we
found her appealing to her sex through the advertising col-
umns of the Times, in such terms as, 'Women of the Borough
and of Tooley Street, it is for your good that I come among
you !' or, 'Hereditary bondswomen of Liverpool, know you
not, who would be free, themselves must strike the blow !'
Assuming (for the sake of argument) our name to be Bellows,
we would rather that no original proceeding, however strik-
ing, on the part of Mrs. Bellows, led to the adoption, at the
various minor theatres and in the Christmas pantomimes, of
the Bellows Costume ; or to the holding at any public assem-
bly-rooms of a Bellows Ball ; or to the composition of count-
less Bellows Polkas ; or to the publication of a ballad (though
a pleasing melody with charming words, and certain to be-
come a favourite) entitled, 'I should like to be a Bellows!"
In a word, if there were anything that we could dispense with
in Mrs. Bellows above all other things, we believe it would be
a Mission. We should put the question thus to Mrs. Bellows.
'Apple of our eye, we will freely admit your inalienable right
to step out of your domestic path into any phase of public
appearance and palaver that pleases you best ; but we doubt
the wisdom of such a sally. Beloved one, does your sex seek
304 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
influence in the civilised world? Surely it possesses influence
therein to no mean extent, and has possessed it since the civ-
ilised world was. Should we love our Julia (assuming, for
the sake of argument, the Christian name of Mrs. Bellows to
be Julia), — should we love our Julia better, if she were a
Member of Parliament, a Parochial Guardian, a High Sheriff,
a Grand Juror, or a woman distinguished for her able conduct
in the chair? Do we not, on the contrary, rather seek in the
society of our Julia, a haven of refuge from Members of
Parliament, Parochial Guardians, High Sheriffs, Grand Ju-
rors, and able chairmen? Is not the home- voice of our Julia
as the song of a bird, after considerable bow-wowing out of
doors? And is our Julia certain that she has a small table
and water-bottle Mission round the corner, when here are
nine (say, for the sake of argument, nine) little Bellowses to
mend, or mar, at home? Does our heart's best treasure refer
us to the land across the Atlantic for a precedent? Then let
us remind our Julia, with all respect for the true greatness of
that great country, that it is not generally renowned for its
domestic rest, and that it may have yet to form itself for
its best happiness on the domestic patterns of other lands.'
Such would be, in a general way, the nature of our ground in
reasoning the point with Mrs. Bellows; but we freely admit
all this to be a question of taste.
To return to the sucking pig, Bloomerism. The porcine
likeness is remarkable in many particulars. In the first place,
it will not do for Mrs. Bellows to be a Budder or a Blower.
She must come out of that altogether, and be a Bloomer. It
is not enough for Mrs. Bellows to understand that the Bloomer
costume is the perfection of delicacy. She must further dis-
tinctly comprehend that the ordinary evening dress of herself
and her two eldest girls (as innocent and good girls as can be)
is the perfection of iwdelicacy. She must not content herself
with defending the Bloomer modesty. She must run amuck,
and slander in the new light of her advanced refinement, cus-
toms that to our coarse minds are harmless and beautiful.
What is not indicated (in something of the fashion of a ship's
figurehead) through the tight medium of a Bloomer waistcoat,
must be distinctly understood to be, under any other circum-
SUCKING PIGS 305
stances, absolutely shocking to persons of true refinement.
What is the next reason for which Mrs. Bellows is called
upon, in a strong-minded way, to enroll herself a Bloomer?
Tight lacing has done a deal of harm in the world ; and Mrs.
Bellows cannot by any possibility leave off her stays, or lace
them loosely, without Blooming all over, from head to foot.
In this will be observed the true Whole Hog philosophy. Ad-
mitting (what, of course, is obvious to every one) that there
can be no kind of question as to the universality among us
of this custom of tight lacing ; admitting that there has been
no improvement since the days of the now venerable carica-
tures, in which a lady's figure was always represented like
an hour-glass or a wasp ; admitting that there has been no
ray of enlightenment on this subject; that marriageable
Englishmen invariably choose their wives for the smallness of
their waists, as Chinese husbands choose theirs for the small-
ness of their feet ; that portrait painters always represent their
beauties in the old conventional stays ; and that the murderous
custom of tight whale-boning and lacing is not confined to a
few ignorant girls here and there, probably under the direction
of some dense old woman in velvet, the weight of whose gor-
geous turban would seem to have settled on her brain and
addled her understanding; — admitting all this, which is so
self-evident and clear, the next triumphant proposition is,
that Mrs. Bellows cannot come out of a pair of stays, with-
out instantly going into a waistcoat, and can by no human
ingenuity be set right about the waist, without standing
pledged to pantaloons gathered and tied about the ankles.
It further appears, that when Mrs. Bellows goes out for a
walk in dirty weather, she splashes her long dress and spoils
it, or raises it with one hand and wounds the feelings of Mrs.
Colonel Bloomer to an insupportable extent. Now, Mrs.
Bellows may not, must not, cannot, will not, shall not, shorten
her long dress, or adopt any other mode that her own in-
genuity (and she is a very ingenious woman) may suggest
to her of remedying the inconvenience; but she must be a
Bloomer, a whole Bloomer, and nothing but a Bloomer, or
remain for ever a Slave and a Pariah.
And it is a similar feature in this little pig, that even if
306 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Mrs. Bellows chooses to become, of her own free will and
liking, a Bloomer, that won't do. She must agitate, agitate,
agitate. She must take to the little table and water-bottle.
She must go in to be a public character. She must work
away at a Mission. It is not enough to do right for right's
sake. There can be no satisfaction for Mrs. Bellows, in
satisfying her mind after due reflection that the thing she
contemplates is right, and therefore ought to be done, and
so in calmly and quietly doing it, conscious that therein she
sets a righteous example which never can in the nature of
things be lost and thrown away. Mrs. Bellows has no busi-
ness to be self-dependent, and to preserve a quiet little avenue
of her own in the world, begirt with her own influences and
duties. She must discharge herself of a vast amount of
words, she must enlist into an Army composed entirely of
Trumpeters, she must come (with the Misses Bellows) into
a resounding Spartan Hall for the purpose. To be sure,
however, it is to be remarked, that this is the noisy manner
in which all great social deeds have been done. Mr. Howard,
for example, put on a shovel hat turned up with sky-blue
fringe, the moment he conceived the humane idea of his life,
and (instead of calmly executing it) ever afterwards perpetu-
ally wandered about, calling upon all other men to put on
shovel hats with sky-blue fringe, and declare themselves How-
ardians. Mrs. Fry, in like manner, did not tamely pass her
time in Jails, devoted with unwavering steadiness, to one good
purpose, sustained by that good purpose, by her strong
conscience, and her upright heart, but restlessly went up and
down the earth, requiring all women to come forward and be
Fryars. Grace Darling, her heroic action done, never retired
(as the vulgar suppose) into the solitary Lighthouse which
her father kept, content to pass her life there in the discharge
of ordinary unexciting duties, unless the similar peril of a
fellow-creature should rouse her to similar generous daring;
but instantly got a Darling medal struck and made a tour
through the Provinces, accompanied by several bushels of the
same, by a table, water-bottle, tumbler, and money-taker, and
delivered lectures calling on her sex to mount the medal —
pledge themselves, with three times three, never to behold a
SUCKING PIGS 307
human being in danger of drowning without putting off in
a boat to that human being's aid — and enroll themselves
Darlings, one and all.
We had in our contemplation, in beginning these remarks,
to suggest to the troops under the command of Mrs. Colonel
Bloomer, that their prowess might be usefully directed to the
checking, rather than to the encouragement, of masquerade
attire. As for example, we observe a certain sanctimonious
waistcoat breaking out among the junior clergy of this realm,
which we take the liberty to consider by far the most in-
censing garment ever cut: calculated to lead to breaches of
the peace, as moving persons of a temperament open to ag-
gravating influences, to seize the collar and shake off the but-
tons. Again, we cannot be unmindful of the popularity,
among others of the junior clergy, of a meek, spare, large-
buttoned, long-skirted, black frock coat, curiously fastened
at the neck round a smooth white band ; two ordinary wearers
of which cassock we beheld, but the other day, at a Marriage
Ceremony whereunto we had the honour to be bidden, myste-
riously and gratuitously emerge during the proceedings from
a stage-door near the altar, and grimly make motions at the
marriage-party with certain of their right-hand fingers, re-
sembling those which issued from the last live Guy Fawkes
whom we saw carried in procession round a certain public place
at Rome. Again, some clerical dignitaries fare compelled
(therefore they are to be sympathised with, and not con-
demned) to wear an apron: which few unaccustomed persons
can behold with gravity. Further, Her Majesty's Judges at
law, than whom a class more worthy of all respect and honour
does not live, are required on most public occasions, but es-
pecially on the first day of term, to maintain an elevated posi-
tion behind little desks, with the irksome consciousness of
being grinned at in the Cheshire manner (on account of their
extraordinary attire) by all comers.
Hence it was that we intended to throw out that suggestion
of possible usefulness to the Bloomer forces at which we have
sufficiently hinted. But on second thoughts we feel no need
to do so, being convinced that they already have, as all things
in the world are said to have, their use. They serve
308 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
To point the moral and adorn the tail
of Whole Hogs. In the lineaments of the Sucking Pig,
Bloomerism, we observe a kind of miniature, with a new and
pleasant absurdity in it, of that family. The service it may
help to do, is, to divest the family of what is unreasonable
and groundlessly antagonistic in its character — which never
can be profitable — and so to strengthen the good that is in
it — which is very great.
A SLEEP TO STARTLE US
[MARCH 13, 1852]
AT the top of Farringdon Street in the City of London, once
adorned by the Fleet Prison and by a diabolical jumble of
nuisances in the middle of the road called Fleet Market, is a
broad new thoroughfare in a state of transition. A few
years hence, and we of the present generation will find it
not an easy task to recall, in the thriving street which will
arise upon this spot, the wooden barriers and hoardings —
the passages that lead to nothing — the glimpses of obscene
Field Lane and Saffron Hill — the mounds of earth, old bricks,
and oyster-shells — the arched foundations of unbuilt houses
— the backs 0f miserable tenements with patched windows —
the odds and ends of fever-stricken courts and alleys — which
are the present features of the place. Not less perplexing
do I find it now, to reckon how many years have passed since
I traversed these byways one night before they were laid
bare, to find out the first Ragged School.
If I say it is ten years ago, I leave a handsome margin.
The discovery was then newly made, that to talk soundingly
in Parliament, and cheer for Church and State, or to conse-
crate and confirm without end, or to perorate to any extent in
a thousand market-places about all the ordinary topics of
patriotic songs and sentiments, was merely to embellish Eng-
land on a great scale with whited sepulchres, while there was,
in every corner of the land where its people were closely ac-
cumulated, profound ignorance and perfect barbarism. It
A SLEEP TO STARTLE US 309
was also newly discovered, that out of these noxious sinks
where they were born to perish, and where the general ruin
was hatching day and night, the people would not come to be
improved. The gulf between them and all wholesome hu-
manity had swollen to such a depth and breadth, that they
were separated from it as by impassable seas or deserts ; and
so they lived, and so they died : an always increasing band of
outlaws in body and soul, against whom it were to suppose the
reversal of all laws, human and divine, to believe that Society
could at last prevail.
In this condition of things, a few unaccredited messengers
of Christianity, whom no Bishop had ever heard of, and no
Government-office Porter had ever seen, resolved to go to the
miserable wretches who had lost the way to them ; and to set
up places of instruction in their own degraded haunts. I
found my first Ragged School, in an obscure place called
West Street, Saffron Hill, pitifully struggling for life, under
every disadvantage. It had no means, it had no suitable
rooms, it derived no power or protection from being recog-
nised by any authority, it attracted within its wretched walls
a fluctuating swarm of faces — young in years but youthful
in nothing else — that scowled Hope out of countenance. It
was held in a low-roofed den, in a sickening atmosphere, in
the midst of taint and dirt and pestilence: with all the deadly
sins let loose, howling and shrieking at the doors. Zeal did
not supply the place of method and training; the teachers
knew little of their office; the pupils with an evil sharpness,
found them out, got the better of them, derided them, made
blasphemous answers to scriptural questions, sang, fought,
danced, robbed each other; seemed possessed by legions of
devils. The place was stormed and carried, over and over
again ; the lights were blown out, the books strewn in the
gutters, and the female scholars carried off triumphantly to
their old wickedness. With no strength in it but its purpose,
the school stood it all out and made its way. Some two
years since, I found it, one of many such, in a large conve-
nient loft in this transition part of Farringdon Street — quiet
and orderly, full, lighted with gas, well whitewashed, numer-
ously attended, and thoroughly established.
310 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The number of houseless creatures who resorted to it, and
who were necessarily turned out when it closed, to hide where
they could in heaps of moral and physical pollution, filled the
managers with pity. To relieve some of the more constant
and deserving scholars, they rented a wretched house, where
a few common beds — a dozen or a dozen-and-a-half perhaps —
were made upon the floor. This was the Ragged School
Dormitory; and when I found the School in Farringdon
Street, I found the Dormitory in a court hard by, which in
the time of the Cholera had acquired a dismal fame. The
Dormitory was, in all respects, save as a small beginning, a
very discouraging Institution. The air was bad ; the dark
and ruinous building, with its small close rooms, was quite
unsuited to the purpose; and a general supervision of the
scattered sleepers was impossible. I had great doubts at the
time whether, excepting that they found a crazy shelter for
their heads, they were better there than in the streets.
Having heard, in the course of last month, that this Dor-
mitory (there are others elsewhere) had grown as the School
had grown, I went the other night to make another visit to
it. I found the School in the same place, still advancing. It
was now an Industrial School too; and besides the men and
boys who were learning — some, aptly enough; some, with
painful difficulty ; some, sluggishly and wearily ; some, not
at all — to read and write and cipher; there were two groups,
one of shoemakers, and one (in a gallery) of tailors, working
with great industry and satisfaction. Each was taught and
superintended by a regular workman engaged for the pur-
pose, who delivered out the necessary means and implements.
All were employed in mending, either their own dilapidated
clothes or shoes, or the dilapidated clothes or shoes of some
of the other pupils. They were of all ages, from young boys
to old men. They were quiet, and intent upon their work.
Some of them were almost as unused to it as I should have
shown myself to be if I had tried my hand, but all were
deeply interested and profoundly anxious to do it somehow
or other. They presented a very remarkable instance of the
general desire there is, after all, even in the vagabond breast,
to know something useful. One shock-headed man when he
A SLEEP TO STARTLE US 311
had mended his own scrap of a coat, drew it on with such an
air of satisfaction, and put himself to so much inconvenience
to look at the elbow he had darned, that I thought a new
coat (and the mind could not imagine a period when that coat
of his was new!) would not have pleased him better. In the
other part of the School, where each class was partitioned off
by screens adjusted like the boxes in a coffee-room, was some
very good writing, and some singing of the multiplication-
table — the latter, on a principle much too juvenile and inno-
cent for some of the singers. There was also a ciphering-
class, where a young pupil teacher out of the streets, who
refreshed himself by spitting every half-minute, had written
a legible sum in compound addition, on a broken slate, and
was walking backward and forward before it, as he worked
it, for the instruction of his class, in this way:
Now thenl Look here, all on you! Seven and five, how
many ?
SHARP BOY (in no particular clothes). Twelve!
PUPIL, TEACHER. Twelve — and eight?
DULL YOUNG MAN (with water on the brain). Forty-five!
SHARP BOY. Twenty !
PUPIL, TEACHER. Twenty. You 're right. And nine?
DULL, YOUNG MAN (after great consideration). Twenty-
nine !
PUPIL TEACHER. Twenty-nine it is. And nine?
RECKLESS GUESSER. Seventy-four!
PUPIL TEACHER (drawing nine strokes). How can that
be? Here's nine on 'em! Look! Twenty-nine, and one's
thirty, and one 's thirty-one, and one 's thirty-two, and one 's
thirty-three, and one 's thirty-four, and one 's thirty-five, and
one's thirty-six, and one's thirty-seven, and one's what?
RECKLESS GUESSER. Four-and-two-pence farden !
DULL YOUNG MAN (who has been absorbed in the demon-
stration). Thirty-eight!
PUPIL TEACHER (restraining sharp boy's ardour). Of
course it is! Thirty-eight pence. There they are! (writing
38 in slate-corner). Now what do you make of thirty-eight
pence? Thirty-eight pence, how much? (Dull young man
slowly considers and gives it up, under a week.) How much
312 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
you? (to sleepy boy, who stares and says nothing). How
much, you?
SHARP Boy. Three-and-twopence !
PUPIL TEACHER. Three-and-twopence. How do I put
down three-and-twopence?
SHARP BOY. You puts down the two, and you carries the
three.
PUPIL TEACHER. Very good. Where do I carry the
three ?
RECKLESS GUESSER. T5 other side the slate !
SHARP BOY. You carries him to the next column on the
left hand, and adds him on !
PUPIL TEACHER. And adds him on ! and eight and three 's
eleven, and eight's nineteen, and seven 's what?
— And so on.
The best and most spirited teacher was a young man, him-
self reclaimed through the agency of this School from the
lowest depths of misery and debasement, whom the Commit-
tee were about to send out to Australia. He appeared quite
to deserve the interest they took in him, and his appearance
and manner were a strong testimony to the merits of the es-
tablishment.
All this was not the Dormitory, but it was the preparation
for it. No man or boy is admitted to the Dormitory, unless
he is a regular attendant at the school, and unless he has been
in the school two hours before the time of opening the Dormi-
tory. If there be reason to suppose that he can get any work
to do and will not do it, he is admitted no more, and his place
is assigned to some other candidate for the nightly refuge:
of whom there are always plenty. There is very little to
tempt the idle and profligate. A scanty supper and a scanty
breakfast, each of six ounces of bread and nothing else (this
quantity is less than the present penny-loaf), would scarcely
be regarded by Mr. Chadwick himself as a festive or uproari-
ous entertainment.
[ found the Dormitory below the School: with its bare
walls and rafters, and bare floor, the building looked rather
like an extensive coach-house, well lighted with gas. A
wooden gallery had been recently erected on three sides of it ;
A SLEEP TO STARTLE US 313
and, abutting from the centre of the wall on the fourth side,
was a kind of glazed meat-safe, accessible by a ladder; in
which the presiding officer is posted every night, and all night.
In the centre of the room, which was very cool, and perfectly
sweet, stood a small fixed stove ; on two sides, there were win-
dows ; on all sides, simple means of admitting fresh air, and
releasing foul air. The ventilation of the place, devised by
Doctor Arnott, and particularly the expedient for relieving
the sleepers in the galleries from receiving the breath of the
sleepers below, is a wonder of simplicity, cheapness, efficiency,
and practical good sense. If it had cost five or ten thousand
pounds, it would have been famous.
The whole floor of the building, with the exception of a
few narrow pathways, was partitioned off into wooden
troughs, or shallow boxes without lids — not unlike the fittings
in the shop of a dealer in corn and flour, and seeds. The
galleries were parcelled out in the same way. Some of these
berths were very short — for boys ; some, longer — for men.
The largest were of very contracted limits ; all were composed
of the bare boards ; each was furnished only with one coarse
rug, rolled up. In the brick pathways were iron gratings
communicating with trapped drains, enabling the entire sur-
face of these sleeping-places to be soused and flooded with
water every morning. The floor of the galleries was cased
with zinc, and fitted with gutters and escape-pipes, for the
same reason. A supply of water, both for drinking and for
washing, and some tin vessels for either purpose, were at hand.
A little shed, used by one of the industrial classes, for the
chopping up of firewood, did not occupy the whole of the
spare space in that corner ; and the remainder was devoted
to some excellent baths, available also as washing troughs, in
order that those who have any rags of linen may clean them
once a-week. In aid of this object, a drying-closet, charged
with hot-air, was about to be erected in the wood-chopping
shed. All these appliances were constructed in the simplest
manner, with the commonest means, in the narrowest space,
at the lowest cost ; but were perfectly adapted to their respec-
tive purposes.
I had scarcely made the round of the Dormitory, and looked
314 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
at aJl these things, when a moving of feet overhead announced
that the School was breaking up for the night. It was suc-
ceeded by profound silence, and then by a hymn, sung in a
subdued tone, and in very good time and tune, by the learners
we had lately seen. Separated from their miserable bodies,
the effect of their voices, united in this strain, was infinitely
solemn. It was as if their souls were singing — as if the out-
ward differences that parted us had fallen away, and the time
was come when all the perverted good that was in them, or
that ever might have been in them, arose imploringly to
Heaven.
The baker who had brought the bread, and who leaned
against a pillar while the singing was in progress, meditating
in his way, whatever his way was, now shouldered his basket
and retired. The two half-starved attendants (rewarded with
a double portion for their pains) heaped the six-ounce loaves
into other baskets, and made ready to distribute them. The
night-officer arrived, mounted to his meat-safe, unlocked it,
hung up his hat, and prepared to spend the evening. I found
him to be a very respectable-looking person in black, with a
wife and family ; engaged in an office all day, and passing his
spare time here, from half-past nine every night to six every
morning, for a pound a-week. He had carried the post
against two hundred competitors.
The door was now opened, and the men and boys who were
to pass that night in the Dormitory, in number one hundred
and sixty-seven (including a man for whom there was no
trough, but who was allowed to rest in the seat by the stove,
once occupied by the night-officer before the meat-safe was),
came in. They passed to their different sleeping-places,
quietly and in good order. Every one sat down in his own
crib, where he became presented in a curiously foreshortened
manner; and those who had shoes took them off, and placed
them in the adjoining path. There were, in the assembly,
thieves, cadgers, trampers, vagrants, common outcasts of all
sorts. In casual wards and many other Refuges, they would
have been very difficult to deal with ; but they were restrained
here by the law of kindness, and had long since arrived at the
knowledge that those who gave him that shelter could have
A SLEEP TO STARTLE US 315
no possible inducement save to do them good. Neighbours
spoke little together — they were almost as uncompanionable
as mad people — but everybody took his small loaf when the
baskets went round, with a thankfulness more or less cheerful,
and immediately ate it up.
There was some excitement in consequence of one man
being missing; 'the lame old man.' Everybody had seen the
lame old man upstairs asleep, but he had unaccountably dis-
appeared. What he had been doing with himself was a mys-
tery, but, when the inquiry was at its height, he came shuf-
fling and tumbling in, with his palsied head hanging on his
breast — an emaciated drunkard, once a compositor, dying of
starvation and decay. He was so near death, that he could
not be kept there, lest he should die in the night ; and, while
it was under deliberation what to do with him, and while his
dull lips tried to shape out answers to what was said to him,
he was held up by two men. Beside this wreck, but all un-
connected with it and with the whole world, was an orphan
boy with burning cheeks and great gaunt eager eyes, who was
in pressing peril of death, too, and who had no possession
under the broad sky but a bottle of physic and a scrap of
writing. He brought both from the house-surgeon of a Hos-
pital that was too full to admit him, and stood, giddily stag-
gering in one of the little pathways, while the Chief Sajmari-
tan read, in hasty characters underlined, how momentous his
necessities were. He held the bottle of physic in his claw of
a hand, and stood, apparently unconscious of it, staggering,
and staring with his bright glazed eyes ; a creature, surely, as
forlorn and desolate as Mother Earth can have supported
on her breast that night. He was gently taken away, along
with the dying man, to the workhouse ; and he passed into the
darkness with his physic-bottle as if he were going into his
grave.
The bread eaten to the last crumb ; and some drinking of
water and washing in water having taken place, with very lit-
tle stir or noise indeed; preparations were made for passing
the night. Some, took off their rags of smock frocks ; some,
their rags of coats or jackets, and spread them out within
their narrow bounds for beds : designing to lie upon them,
316 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and use their rugs as a covering. Some, sat up, pondering,
on the edges of their troughs ; others, who were very tired,
rested their unkempt heads upon their hands and their elbows
on their knees, and dozed. When there were no more who
desired to drink or wash, and all were in their places, the night
officer, standing below the meat-safe, read a short evening
service, including perhaps as inappropriate a prayer as could
possibly be read (as though the Lord's Prayer stood in need
of it by way of Rider), and a portion of a chapter from the
New Testament. Then, they all sang the Evening Hymn,
and then they all lay down to sleep.
It was an awful thing, looking round upon those one hun-
dred and sixty-seven representatives of many thousands, to
reflect that a Government, unable, with the least regard to
truth, to plead ignorance of the existence of such a place,
should proceed as if the sleepers never were to wake again.
I do not hesitate to say — why should I, for I know it to be
true ! — that an annual sum of money, contemptible in amount
as compared with any charges upon any list, freely granted
in behalf of these Schools, and shackled with no preposterous
Red Tape conditions, would relieve the prisons, diminish
county rates, clear loads of shame and guilt out of the streets,
recruit the army and navy, waft to new countries, Fleets full
of useful labour, for which their inhabitants would be thank-
ful and beholden to us. It is no depreciation of the devoted
people whom I found presiding here, to add, that with such
assistance as a trained knowledge of the business of instruc-
tion, and a sound system adjusted to the peculiar difficulties
and conditions of this sphere of action, their usefulness could
be increased fifty-fold in a few months.
My Lords and Gentlemen, can you, at the present time, con-
sider this at last, and agree to do some little easy thing!
Dearly beloved brethren elsewhere, do you know that between
Gorham controversies, and Pusey controversies, and Newman
controversies, and twenty other edifying controversies, a cer-
tain large class of minds in the community is gradually being
driven out of all religion? Would it be well, do you think,
to come out of the controversies for a little while, and be sim-
ply Apostolic thus low down !
BETTING-SHOPS 317
BETTING-SHOPS
[JUNE 26, 1852]
IN one sporting newspaper for Sunday, June the four-
teenth, there are nine-and-twenty advertisements from
Prophets, who have wonderful information to give — for a
consideration ranging from one pound one, to two-and-six-
pence — concerning every 'event' that is to come off upon the
Turf. Each of these Prophets has an unrivalled and un-
challengeable 'Tip,' founded on amazing intelligence com-
municated to him by illustrious unknowns (traitors of course,
but that is nobody's business) in all the racing stables. Each,
is perfectly clear that his enlightened patrons and cor-
respondents must win ; and each, begs to guard a too-confid-
ing world against relying on the other. They are all philan-
thropists. One Sage announces 'that when he casts his prac-
tised eye on the broad surface of struggling society, and wit-
nesses the slow and enduring perseverance of some, and the
infatuous rush of the many who are grappling with a cloud,
he is led with more intense desire to hold up the lamp of light
to all.' He is also much afflicted, because 'not a day passes,
without his witnessing the public squandering away their
money on worthless rubbish.' Another, heralds his re-ap-
pearance among the lesser stars of the firmament with the an-
nouncement, 'Again the Conquering Prophet comes !' An-
other moralist intermingles with his 'Pick,' and 'Tip,' the
great Christian precept of the New Testament. Another,
confesses to a small recent mistake which has made it 'a dis-
astrous meeting for us,' but considers that excuses are un-
necessary (after making them), for, 'surely, after the un-
precedented success of the proofs he has lately afforded of his
capabilities in fishing out the most carefully-hidden turf se-
crets, he may readily be excused one blunder.' All the
Prophets write in a rapid manner, as receiving their inspira-
tion on horseback, and noting it down, hot and hot, in the
saddle, for the enlightenment of mankind and the restoration
of the golden age.
318 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
This flourishing trade is a melancholy index to the round
numbers of human donkeys who are everywhere browzing
about. And it is worthy of remark that the great mass of
disciples were, at first, undoubtedly to be found among those
fast young gentlemen, who are so excruciatingly knowing
that they are not by any means to be taken in by Shakespeare,
or any sentimental gammon of that sort. To us, the idea
of this would-be keen race being preyed upon by the whole
Betting-Book of Prophets, is one of the most ludicrous pic-
tures the mind can imagine; while there is a just and pleasant
retribution in it which would awaken in us anything but ani-
mosity towards the Prophets, if the mischief ended here.
But, the mischief has the drawback that it does not end
here. When there are so many Picks and Tips to be had,
which will, of a surety, pick and tip their happy owners into
the lap of Fortune, it becomes the duty of every butcher's
boy and errand lad who is sensible of what is due to himself,
immediately to secure a Pick and Tip of the cheaper sort,
and to go in and win. Having purchased the talisman from
the Conquering Prophet, it is necessary that the noble sports-
man should have a handy place provided for him, where lists
of the running horses and of the latest state of the odds, are
kept, and where he can lay out his money (or somebody else's)
on the happy animals at whom the Prophetic eye has cast a
knowing wink. Presto! Betting-shops spring up in every
street ! There is a demand at all the brokers' shops for old,
fly-blown, coloured prints of race-horses, and for any odd
folio volumes that have the appearance of Ledgers. Two
such prints in any shop-window, and one such book on any
shop-counter, will make a complete Betting-office, bank, and
all.
The Betting-shop may be a Tobacconist's, thus suddenly
transformed; or it may be nothing but a Betting-shop. It
may be got up cheaply, for the purposes of Pick and Tip
investment, by the removal of the legitimate counter, and
the erection of an official partition and desk in one corner ;
or, it may be wealthy in mahogany fittings, French polish,
and office furniture. The presiding officer, in an advanced
stage of shabbiness, may be accidentally beheld through the
BETTING-SHOPS 319
little window — whence from the inner mysteries of the Tem-
ple, he surveys the devotees before entering on business —
drinking gin with an admiring client ; or he may be a serenely
condescending gentleman of Government Office appearance,
who keeps the books of the establishment with his glass in his
eye. The Institution may stoop to bets of single shillings,
or may reject lower ventures than half-crowns, or may draw
the line of demarcation between itself and the snobs at five
shillings, or seven-and-sixpence, or half-a-sovereign, or even
(but very rarely indeed), at a pound. Its note of the little
transaction may be a miserable scrap of limp pasteboard with
a wretchedly printed form, worse filled up ; or, it may be a
genteelly tinted card, addressed 'To the Cashier of the Aris-
tocratic Club,' and authorising that important officer to pay
the bearer two pounds fifteen shillings, if Greenhorn wins the
Fortunatus's Cup ; and to be very particular to pay it the
day after the race. But, whatever the Betting-shop be, it has
only to be somewhere — anywhere, so people pass and repass
—and the rapid youth of England, with its slang intelligence
perpetually broad awake and its weather eye continually open,
will walk in and deliver up its money, like the helpless Inno-
cent that it is.
'Pleased to the last, it thinks its wager won,
And licks the hand by which it's surely Done!'
We cannot represent the headquarters of Household
Words as being situated peculiarly in the midst of these es-
tablishments, for, they parade the whole of London and its
suburbs. But, our neighbourhood yields an abundant crop
of Betting-shops, and we have not to go far to know some-
thing about them. Passing the other day, through a dirty
thoroughfare, much frequented, near Drury Lane Theatre,
we found that a new Betting-shop had suddenly been added to
the number under the auspices of Mr. Cheerful.
Mr. Cheerful's small establishment was so very like that
of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, unfurnished, and
hastily adapted to the requirements of secure and profitable
investment, that it attracted our particular notice. It burst
into bloom, too, so very shortly before the Ascot Meeting,
320
that we had our suspicions concerning the possibility of Mr.
Cheerful having devised the ingenious speculation of getting
what money he could, up to the day of the race, and then—
if we may be allowed the harsh expression — bolting. We
had no doubt that investments would be made with Mr. Cheer-
ful, notwithstanding the very unpromising appearance of his
establishment; for, even as we were considering its exterior
from the opposite side of the way (it may have been opened
that very morning), we saw two newsboys, an incipient baker,
a clerk, and a young butcher, go in, and transact business
with Mr. Cheerful in a most confiding manner.
We resolved to lay a bet with Mr. Cheerful, and see what
came of it. So we stepped across the road into Mr. Cheer-
ful's Betting-shop, and, having glanced at the lists hanging
up therein, while another noble sportsman (a boy with a blue
bag) laid another bet with Mr. Cheerful, we expressed our
desire to back Tophana for the Western Handicap, to the
spirited amount of half-a-crown. In making this advance
to Mr. Cheerful, we looked as knowing on the subject, both
of Tophana and the Western Handicap, as it was in us to
do : though, to confess the humiliating truth, we neither had,
nor have, the least idea in connection with those proper names,
otherwise than as we suppose Tophana to be a horse, and the
Western Handicap an aggregate of stakes. It being Mr.
Cheerful's business to be grave and ask no questions, he ac-
cepted our wager, booked it, and handed us over his railed
desk the dirty scrap of pasteboard, in right of which we were
to claim — the day after the race; we were to be very par-
ticular about that — seven-and-sixpence sterling, if Tophama
won. Some demon whispering us that here was an oppor-
tunity of discovering whether Mr. Cheerful had a good bank
of silver in the cash-box, we handed in a sovereign. Mr.
Cheerful's head immediately slipped down behind the parti-
tion, investigating imaginary drawers; and Mr. Cheerful's
voice was presently heard to remark, in a stifled manner, that
all the silver had been changed for gold that morning. After
which, Mr. Cheerful reappeared in the twinkling of an eye,
called in from a parlour the sharpest small boy ever beheld
by human vision, and dispatched him for change. We re-
BETTING-SHOPS 321
marked to Mr. Cheerful that if he would obligingly produce
half-a-sovereign (having so much gold by him) we would
increase our bet, and save him trouble. But, Mr. Cheerful,
sliding down behind the partition again, answered that the
boy was gone, now — trust him for that; he had vanished the
instant he was spoken to — and it was no trouble at all.
Therefore, we remained until the boy came back, in the so-
ciety of Mr. Cheerful, and of an inscrutable woman who
stared out resolutely into the street, and was probably Mrs.
Cheerful. When the boy returned, we thought we once saw
him faintly twitch his nose while we received our change, as
if he exulted over a victim ; but, he was so miraculously sharp,
that it was impossible to be certain.
The day after the race, arriving, we returned with our docu-
ment to Mr. Cheerful's establishment, and found it in great
confusion. It was filled by a crowd of boys, mostly greasy,
dirty, and dissipated; and all clamouring for Mr. Cheerful.
Occupying Mr. Cheerful's place, was the miraculous boy; all
alone, and unsupported, but not at all disconcerted. Mr.
Cheerful, he said, had gone out on ' 'tickler bizniz' at ten
o'clock in the morning, and wouldn't be back till late at night.
Mrs. Cheerful was gone out of town for her health, till the
winter. Would Mr. Cheerful be back to-morrow? cried the
crowd. 'He won't be here, to-morrow,' said the miraculous
boy. 'Coz it 's Sunday, and he always goes to church, a'
Sunday.' At this, even the losers laughed. 'Will he be here
a' Monday, then?' asked a desperate young green-grocer.
'A' Monday?' said the miracle, reflecting. 'No, I don't think
he '11 be here, a' Monday, coz he 's going to a sale a' Monday.'
At this, some of the boys taunted the unmoved miracle with
meaning 'a sell instead of a sale,' and others swarmed over
the whole place, and some laughed, and some swore, and one
errand boy, discovering the book — the only thing Mr. Cheer-
ful had left behind him — declared it to be a 'stunning good
'un.' We took the liberty of looking over it, and found
it so. Mr. Cheerful had received about seventeen pounds,
and, even if he had paid his losses, would have made a profit
of between eleven and twelve pounds. It is scarcely necessary
to add that Mr. Cheerful has been so long detained at the sale
322 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
that he has never come back. The last time we loitered past
his late establishment Cover which is inscribed Boot and Shoe
Manufactory), the dusk of evening was closing in, and a
young gentleman from New Inn was making some rather par-
ticular enquiries after him of a dim and dusty man who held
the door a very little way open, and knew nothing about any-
body, and less than nothing (if possible) about Mr. Cheer-
ful. The handle of the lower door-bell was most significantly
pulled out to its utmost extent, and left so, like an Organ stop
in full action. It is to be hoped that the poor gull who had
so frantically rung for Mr. Cheerful, derived some gratifica-
tion from that expenditure of emphasis. He will never get
any other, for his money.
But the public in general are not to be left a prey to such
fellows as Cheerful. O, dear no ! We have better neigh-
bours than that, in the Betting-shop way. Expressly for the
correction of such evils, we have The Tradesmen's Moral As-
sociative Betting Club; the Prospectus of which Institution
for the benefit of tradesmen (headed in the original with a
racing woodcut), we here faithfully present without the alter-
ation of a word.
'The Projectors of the Tradesmen's Moral Associative Bet-
ting Club, in announcing an addition to the number of Betting
Houses in the Metropolis, beg most distinctly to state that
they are not actuated by a feeling of rivalry towards old
established and honourably conducted places of a similar na-
ture, but in a spirit of fair competition, ask for the support
of the public, guaranteeing to them more solid security for
the investment of their monies, than has hitherto been of-
fered.
'The Tradesmen's Moral Associative Betting Club is really
what its name imports, viz., an Association of Tradesmen,
persons in business, who witnessing the robberies hourly in-
flicted upon the humbler portion of the sporting public, by
parties bankrupts alike in character and property, have come
to the conclusion that the establishment of a club wherein
their fellow-tradesmen, and the speculator of a few shillings,
may invest their money with assured consciousness of a fair
BETTING-SHOPS 323
and honourable dealing, will be deemed worthy of public sup-
port.
'The Directors of this establishment feel that much of the
odium attached to Betting Houses, (acting to the prejudice
of those which have striven hard by honourable means to se-
cure public confidence) has arisen from the circumstance, that
many offices have been fitted up in a style of gaudy imitative
magnificence, accompanied by an expense, which, if defrayed,
is obviously out of keeping with the profits of a legitimate
concern. Whilst, in singular contrast, others have presented
such a poverty stricken appearance, that it is evident the de-
sign of the occupant was only to receive money of all, and
terminate in paying none.
'Avoiding these extremes of appearance, and with a de-
termination never to be induced to speculate to an extent, that
may render it even probable that we shall be unable "to pay
the day after the race."
'The business of the club will be carried on at the house of
a highly respectable and well-known tradesman, situate in a
central locality, the existence of an agreement with whom,
on the part of the directors, forms the strongest possible
guarantee of our intention to keep faith with the public.
'The market odds will be laid on all events, and every ticket
issued be signed by the director only, the monies being in-
vested,' etc. etc.
After this, Tradesmen are quite safe in laying out their
money on their favourite horses. And their families, like the
people in old fireside stories, will no doubt live happy ever
afterwards !
Now, it is unquestionable that this evil has risen to a great
height, and that it involves some very serious social consid-
erations. But, with all respect for opinions which we do not
hold, we think it a mistake to cry for legislative interference
in such a case. In the first place, we do not think it wise to
exhibit a legislature which has always cared so little for the
amusements of the people, in repressive action only. If it
had been an educational legislature, considerate of the popu-
lar enjoyments, and sincerely desirous to advance and extend
324 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
them during as long a period as it has been exactly the reverse,
the question might assume a different shape; though, even
then, we should greatly doubt whether the same notion were
not a shifting of the real responsibility. In the second place,
although it is very edifying to have honourable members, and
right honourable members, and honourable and learned mem-
bers, and what not, holding forth in their places upon what
is right, and what is wrong, and what is true, and what is
false — among the people — we have that audacity in us that
we do not admire the present Parliamentary standard and
balance of such questions ; and we believe that if those be not
scrupulously just, Parliament cannot invest itself with much
moral authority. Surely the whole country knows that cer-
tain chivalrous public Prophets have been, for a pretty long
time past, advertising their Pick and Tip in all directions,
pointing out the horse which was to ruin all backers, and
swearing by the horse which was to make everybody's for-
tune! Surely we all know, howsoever our political opinions
may differ, that more than one of them 'casting his practised
eye,' exactly like the Prophet in the sporting paper, 'on the
broad surface of struggling society,' has been possessed by
the same 'intense desire to hold up the lamp of light to
all,' and has solemnly known by the lamp of light that
Black was the winning horse — until his Pick and Tip was
purchased; when he suddenly began to think it might be
White, or even Brown, or very possibly Grey. Surely, we
all know, however reluctant we may be to admit it, that this
has tainted and confused political honesty; that the Elec-
tions before us, and the whole Government of the country,
are at present a great reckless Betting-shop, where the
Prophets have pocketed their own predictions after play-
ing fast and loose with their patrons as long as they could;
and where, casting their practised eyes over things in
general, they are now backing anything and everything for
a chance of winning !
No. If the legislature took the subject in hand it would
make a virtuous demonstration, we have no doubt, but it
would not present an edifying spectacle. Parents and em-
ployers must do more for themselves. Every man should
TRADING IN DEATH 325
know something of the habits and frequentings of those who
are placed under him ; and should know much, when a new
class of temptation thus presents itself. Apprentices are,
by the terms of their indentures, punishable for gaming; it
would do a world of good, to get a few score of that class
of noble sportsmen convicted before magistrates, and shut
up in the House of Correction, to Pick a little oakum, and
Tip a little gruel into their silly stomachs. Betting clerks,
and betting servants of all grades, once detected after a
grave warning, should be firmly dismissed. There are plenty
of industrious and steady young men to supply their places.
The police should receive instructions by no means to over-
look any gentleman of established bad reputation — whether
'wanted' or not — who is to be found connected with a Bet-
ting-shop. It is our belief that several eminent characters
could be so discovered. These precautions ; always sup-
posing parents and employers resolute to discharge their
own duties instead of vaguely delegating them to a legisla-
ture they have no reliance on; would probably be sufficient.
Some fools who are under no control, will always be found
wandering away to ruin ; but, the greater part of that ex-
tensive department of the commonalty are under some control,
and the great need is, that it be better exercised.
TRADING IN DEATH
[NOVEMBER 27, 1852]
SEVERAL years have now elapsed since it began to be clear
to the comprehension of most rational men, that the English
people had fallen into a condition much to be regretted, in
respect of their Funeral customs. A system of barbarous
show and expense was found to have gradually erected itself
above the grave, which, while it could possibly do no honour
to the memory of the dead, did great dishonour to the living,
as inducing them to associate the most solemn of human
occasions with unmeaning mummeries, dishonest debt, pro-
fuse waste, and bad example in an utter oblivion of responsi-
326 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
bility. The more the subject was examined, and the lower
the investigation was carried, the more monstrous (as was
natural) these usages appeared to be, both in themselves and
in their consequences. No ckss of society escaped. The
competition among the middle classes for superior gentility
in Funerals — the gentility being estimated by the amount
of ghastly folly in which the undertaker was permitted to
run riot — descended even to the very poor: to whom the
cost of funeral customs was so ruinous and so disproportion-
ate to their means, that they formed Clubs among themselves
to defray such charges. Many of these Clubs, conducted by
designing villains who preyed upon the general infirmity,
cheated and wronged the poor, most cruelly ; others, by pre-
senting a new class of temptations to the wickedest natures
among them, led to a new class of mercenary murders, so
abominable in their iniquity, that language cannot stigmatise
them with sufficient severity. That nothing might be want-
ing to complete the general depravity, hollowness, and false-
hood, of this state of things, the absurd fact came to light,
that innumerable harpies assumed the titles of furnishers of
Funerals, who possessed no Funeral furniture whatever, but
who formed a long file of middlemen between the chief
mourner and the real tradesman, and who hired out the trap-
pings from one to another — passing them on like water-
buckets at a fire — every one of them charging his enormous
percentage on his share of the 'black job.' Add to all this,
the demonstration, by the simplest and plainest practical
science, of the terrible consequences to the living, inevitably
resulting from the practice of burying the dead in the midst
of crowded towns ; and the exposition of a system of indecent
horror, revolting to our nature and disgraceful to our age
and nation, arising out of the confined limits of such burial-
grounds, and the avarice of their proprietors; and the cul-
minating point of this gigantic mockery is at last arrived at.
Out of such almost incredible degradation, saving that the
proof of it is too easy, we are still very slowly and feebly
emerging. There are now, we confidently hope, among the
middle classes, many, who having made themselves acquainted
with these evils through the parliamentary papers in which
TRADING IN DEATH 327
they are described, would be moved by no human considera-
tion to perpetuate the old bad example ; but who will leave
it as their solemn injunction on their nearest and dearest
survivors, that they shall not, in their death, be made the
instruments of infecting, either the minds or the bodies of
their fellow-creatures. Among persons of note, such
examples have not been wanting. The late Duke of Sussex
did a national service when he desired to be laid, in the
equality of death, in the cemetery of Kensal Green, and not
with the pageantry of a State Funeral in the Royal vault at
Windsor. Sir Robert Peel requested to be buried at Dray-
ton. The late Queen Dowager left a pattern to every rank
in these touching and admirable words: 'I die in all
humility, knowing well that we are all alike before the Throne
of God ; and I request, therefore, that my mortal remains be
conveyed to the grave without any pomp or state. They
are to be removed to St. George's Chapel, Windsor, where
I request to have as private and quiet a funeral as possible.
I particularly desire not to be laid out in state. I die in
peace and wish to be carried to the tomb in peace, and free
from the vanities and pomp of this world. I request not to
be dissected or embalmed, and desire to give as little trouble
as possible.'
With such precedents and such facts fresh in the general
knowledge, and at this transition-time in so serious a chap-
ter of our social history, the obsolete custom of a State
Funeral has been revived, in miscalled 'honour' of the late
Duke of Wellington. To whose glorious memory be all
true honour while England lasts !
We earnestly submit to our readers that there is, and that
there can be, no kind of honour in such a revival ; that the
more truly great the man, the more truly little the ceremony ;
and that it has been, from first to last, a pernicious instance
and encouragement of the demoralising practice of trading
in Death.
It is within the knowledge of the whole public, of all
diversities of political opinion, whether or no any of the
Powers that be, have traded in this Death — -have saved it up,
and petted it, and made the most of it, and reluctantly let it
328 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
go. On that aspect of the question we offer no further re-
mark.
But, of the general trading spirit which, in its inherent
emptiness and want of consistency and reality, the long-
deferred State Funeral has appropriately awakened, we
will proceed to furnish a few instances all faithfully copied
from the advertising columns of the Times.
First, of seats and refreshments. Passing over that de-
sirable first-floor where a party could be accommodated with
'the use of a piano'; and merely glancing at the decorous
daily announcement of 'The Duke of Wellington Funeral
Wine,' which was in such high demand that immediate orders
were necessary; and also 'The Duke of Wellington Funeral
Cake,' which 'delicious article' could only be had of such a
baker ; and likewise 'The Funeral Life Preserver,' which could
only be had of such a tailor; and further 'the celebrated
lemon biscuits,' at one and fourpence per pound, which were
considered by the manufacturer as the only infallible assua-
gers of the national grief; let us pass in review some dozen
of the more eligible opportunities the public had of profit-
ing by the occasion.
T UDGATE HILL. — The fittings and arrangements for view-
*-** ing this grand and solemnly imposing procession are now
completed at this establishment, and those who are desirous of
obtaining a fine and extensive view, combined with every personal
convenience and comfort, will do well to make immediate in-
spection of the SEATS now remaining on hand.
"CUJNERAL, including Beds the night previous. — To be LET,
a SECOND FLOOR, of three rooms, two windows, having
a good view of the procession. Terms, including refreshment,
10 guineas. Single places, including bed and breakfast, from
15*.
'T'HE DUKE'S FUNERAL.— A first-rate VIEW for 15 per-
sons, also good clean beds and a sitting-room on reasonable
terms.
*
CEATS and WINDOWS to be LET, in the best part of the
Strand, a few doors from Coutts's banking-house. First
floor windows, £8 each; second floor, £5 10*. each; third floor,
€8 10*. each; two plate-glass shop windows, £7 each.
TRADING IN DEATH 329
CEATS to VIEW the DUKE of WELLINGTON'S FUN-
^ ERAL. Best position of all the route, no obstruction to the
view. Apply Old Bailey. N.B. From the above position you
can nearly see to St. Paul's and to Temple Bar.
P<UNERAL of the late Duke of WELLINGTON.— To be
1 LET, a SECOND FLOOR, two windows, firing and every
convenience. Terms moderate for a party. Also a few seats
in front, one guinea each. - Commanding a view from Piccadilly
to Pall Mall.
of the DUKE of WELLINGTON.— The FIRST
and SECOND FLOORS to be LET, either by the room or
window, suited to gentlemen's families, for whom every comfort
and accommodation will be provided, and commanding the very
best view of this imposing spectacle. The ground floor is also
fitted up with commodious seats, ranging in price from one
guinea. Apply on the premises.
DUKE'S FUNERAL.— Terms very moderate.— TWO
FIRST FLOOR ROOMS, with balcony and private entrance
out of the Strand. The larger room capable of holding 15 per-
sons. The small room to be let for eight guineas.
DUKE'S FUNERAL.— To be LET, a SHOP WIN-
DOW, with seats erected for about 30, for 25 guineas. Also
a Furnished First Floor, with two large windows. One of the
best views in the whole range from Temple Bar to St. Paul's.
Price 35 guineas. A few single seats one guinea each.
THE FUNERAL PROCESSION of the DUKE of WEL-
LINGTON.— Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, decidedly the
best position in the whole route, a few SEATS still DISEN-
GAGED, which will be offered at reasonable prices. An early
application is requisite, as they are fast filling up. Also a few
places on the roof. A most excellent view.
FUNERAL of the Late DUKE of WELLINGTON.— To be
LET, in the best part of the Strand, a SECOND FLOOR,
for £10; a Third Floor, £7 10*., containing two windows in each;
front seats in shop, at one guinea.
'T'HE DUKE'S FUNERAL.— To be LET, for 25 guineas to
*• a genteel family, in one of the most commanding situations
in the line of route, a FIRST FLOOR, with safe balcony, and
330 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ante-room. Will accommodate 20 persons, with an uninterrupted
and extensive view for all. For a family of less number a re-
duction will be made. Every accommodation will be afforded.
But above all let us not forget the
TUOTICE TO CLERGYMEN.— T. C. Fleet Street, has re-
served for clergymen exclusively, upon condition only that
they appear in their surplices, FOUR FRONT SEATS, at £l
each; four second tier, at 15*. each; four third tier, at 12*. 6d. ;
four fourth tier, at 10*.; four fifth tier, at 7*. 6d.; and four
sixth tier, at 5*. All the other seats are respectively 40*., SO*.,
20*., 15*., 10*.
The anxiety of this enterprising tradesman to get up a
reverend tableau in his shop-window of four-and-twenty
clergymen all on six rows, is particularly commendable, and
appears to us to shed a remarkable grace on the solemnity.
These few specimens are collected at random from scores
upon scores of such advertisements, mingled with descrip-
tions of non-existent ranges of view, and with invitations
to a few agreeable gentlemen who are wanted to complete a
little assembly of kindred souls, who have laid in abundance
of 'refreshments, wines, spirits, provisions, fruit, plate, glass,
china,' and other light matters too numerous to mention,
and who keep 'good fires.' On looking over them we are con-
stantly startled by the words in large capitals, 'WOULD TO
GOD NIGHT OR BLUCHER WERE COME!' which, referring to a
work of art, are relieved by a legend setting forth how the
lamented hero observed of it, *in his characteristic manner,
"Very good ; very good indeed." ' O Art ! You too trading
in Death!
Then, autographs fall into their place in the State Funeral
train. The sanctity of a seal, or the confidence of a letter,
is a meaningless phrase that has no place in the vocabulary
of the Traders in Death. Stop, trumpets, in the Dead
March, and blow to the world how characteristic we auto-
graphs are !
TRADING IN DEATH 331
AUTOGRAPHS.— TWO consecutive LET-
TERS of the DUKE'S (1843) highly characteristic and
authentic, with the Correspondence, etc. that elicited them, the
whole forming quite a literary curiosity, for £15.
\K7ELLINGTON AUTOGRAPHS.— To be DISPOSED OF,
TWO AUTOGRAPH LETTERS of the DUKE of WEL-
LINGTON, one dated Walmer Castle, pth October, 1834, the
other London, 17th May, 1843, with their post-marks and seals.
VyELLINGTON.— THREE original NOTES, averaging 2±
pages each, (not lithographs), seal, and envelopes, to be
SOLD. Supposed to be the most characteristic of his Grace yet
published. The highest sum above £30 for the two, or £20 for
the one, which is distinct, will be accepted.
BE DISPOSED OF, by a retired officer, FIVE LETTERS
and NOTES of the late HERO— three when Sir A. Welles-
ley. Also a large Envelope. All with seals. Apply personally,
or by letter.
nHHE DUKE'S LETTERS.— TWO highly interesting LET-
TERS, authentic, and relating to a most amusing and char-
acteristic circumstance, to be SOLD.
DUKE of WELLINGTON.— AUTOGRAPH LET-
A TER to a lady, with seal and envelope. This is quite in
the Duke's peculiar style, and will be parted with for the highest
offer. Apply - where the letter can be seen.
P M. the DUKE of WELLINGTON.— To be SOLD, by a
• member of the family, to whom it was written, an ORIG-
INAL AUTOGRAPH LETTER of the late Duke of Welling-
ton, on military affairs, six pages long, in the best preservation.
Price £30.
"FIELD-MARSHAL the DUKE of WELLINGTON'S AUTO-
r GRAPH.— A highly characteristic LETTER of the
DUKE'S for DISPOSAL, wherein he alludes to his living 100
years, date 1847, with envelope. Seal, with crest perfect. £10
will be taken.
332 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
DUKE of WELLINGTON.— An AUTOGRAPH LETTER
of the DUKE, written immediately after the death of the
Duchess in 1831, is for SALE; also Two Autograph Envelopes
franked and sealed.
D
UKE of WELLINGTON.— AUTOGRAPH BUSINESS
LETTER, envelope, seal, post-mark, etc. complete. Style
courteous and highly characteristic. Will be shown by the party
and at the place addressed. Price £15.
CUELD-MARSHAL the DUKE of WELLINGTON.— TWO
AUTOGRAPH LETTERS of His Grace, one written in his
6 1st, the other in his 72d year, both first-rate specimens of his
characteristic graphic style, and on an important subject, to be
SOLD. Their genuineness can be fully proved.
HTHE DUKE of WELLINGTON.— A very curious DOCU-
ME NT, partly printed, and the rest written by His Grace
to a lady. This is well worthy of a place in the cabinet of
the curious. There is nothing like it. Highest offer will be
taken. •
•TO be SOLD, SIX AUTOGRAPH LETTERS from F.M. the
1 Duke of WELLINGTON, with envelopes and seals, which
have been most generously given to aid a lady in distressed cir-
cumstances.
'THE DUKE of WELLINGTON.— A lady has in her posses-
sion a LETTER, written by his Grace on the 18th of June,
in the present year, and will be happy to DISPOSE OF the
same. The letter is rendered more valuable by its being writ-
ten on the last anniversary which his Grace was spared to cele-
brate. The letter bears date from Apsley House, with perfect
envelope and seal.
CLERGYMAN has TWO LETTERS, with Envelopes, ad-
dressed to him by the late Duke, and bearing striking testi-
mony to the extent of his Grace's private charities, to be
DISPOSED OF at the highest offer (for one or both), re-
ceived by the 18th instant. The offers may be contingent on
further particulars being satisfactory.
338
DUKE OF WELLINGTON.— A widow, in deep distress,
1 has in her possession an AUTOGRAPH LETTER of his
Grace the Duke of WELLINGTON, written in 1830, enclosed
and directed in an envelope, and sealed with his ducal coronet,
which she would be happy to PART WITH for a trifle.
\7ALUABLE AUTOGRAPH NOTE of the late Duke of
V WELLINGTON, dated March 27, 1850, to be SOLD for
£20, by the gentleman to whom it was addressed, together with
envelope, perfect impression of Ducal seal, and Knightsbridge
post-mark distinct. The whole in excellent preservation. A bet-
ter specimen of the noble Duke's handwriting and highly char-
acteristic style cannot be seen.
ONE of the last LETTERS of the DUKE of WELLING-
TON for DISPOSAL, dated from Walmer Castle within a
day or two of his death, highly characteristic, with seal and
post-marks distinct. This being- probably the last letter writ-
ten by the late Duke its interest as a relic must be greatly en-
hanced. The highest offer accepted. May be seen on applica-
tion.
HHHE GREAT DUKE.— A LETTER of the GREAT HERO,
•*• dated March 27, 1851, to be SOLD. Also a beautiful Let-
ter from Jenny Lind, dated June 20, 1852. The highest offer
will be accepted. Address with offers of price.
Miss Lind's autograph would appear to have lingered in
the shade until the Funeral Train came by, when it modestly
stepped into the procession and took a conspicuous place.
We are in doubt which to admire most ; the ingenuity of this
little stroke of business ; or the affecting delicacy that sells
'probably the last letter written by the late Duke' before the
aged hand that wrote it under some manly sense of duty, is
yet withered in its grave; or the piety of that excellent
clergyman — did he appear in his surplice in the front row of
T. C.'s shop-window? — who is so anxious to sell 'striking
testimony to the extent of His Grace's private charities'; or
the generosity of that Good Samaritan who poured 'six let-
ters with envelopes and seals' into the wounds of the lady
in distressed circumstances.
334 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Lastly come the relics — precious remembrances worn next
to the bereaved heart, like Hardy's miniature of Nelson, and
never to be wrested from the advertisers but with ready
money.
M
EMENTO of the late DUKE of WELLINGTON.— To be
DISPOSED OF, a LOCK of the late illustrious DUKE'S
HAIR. Can be guaranteed. The highest offer will be accepted.
Apply by letter prepaid.
T
1HE DUKE of WELLINGTON.— A LOCK of HAIR of
the late Duke of WELLINGTON to be DISPOSED OF,
now in the possession of a widow lady. Cut off the morning the
Queen was crowned. Apply by letter, post paid.
\ VALUABLE RELIC of the late DUKE of WELLINGTON.
* — A lady, having in her possession a quantity of the late
illustrious DUKE'S HAIR, cut in 1841, is willing to PART
WITH a portion of the same for £25. Satisfactory proof will
be given of its identity, and of how it came into the owner's pos-
session, on application by letter, pre-paid.
D ELIC of the DUKE of WELLINGTON for SALE.— The
son of the late well-known haircutter to his Grace the late
Duke of Wellington, at Strathfieldsaye, has a small quantity of
HAIR, that his father cut from the Duke's head, which he is
willing to DISPOSE OF. Any one desirous of possessing such
a relic of England's hero are requested to make their offer for
the same, by letter.
O ELICS of the late DUKE of WELLINGTON.— For SALE,
**• a WAISTCOAT, in good preservation, worn by his Grace
some years back, which can be well authenticated as such.
Next, a very choice article — quite unique — the value of
which may be presumed to be considerably enhanced by the
conclusive impossibility of its being doubted in the least
degree by the most suspicious mind.
MEMENTO of the DUKE of WELLINGTON.— La Mort
de Napoleon, Ode d'Alexandre Manzoni, avec la Traduction
en Francais, par Edmond Angelini, de Venise. — A book, of
TRADING IN DEATH 335
which the above is the title, was torn up by the Duke and thrown
by him from the carriage, in which he was riding, as he was
passing through Kent: the pieces of the book were collected and
put together by a person who saw the Duke tear it and throw
the same away. Any person desirous of obtaining the above
memento will be communicated with.
Finally, a literary production of astonishing brilliancy and
spirit ; without which, we are authorised to state, no noble-
man's or gentleman's library can be considered complete.
of WELLINGTON and SIR R. PEEL.— A talented,
interesting, and valuable WORK, on Political Economy and
Free Trade, was published in 1830, and immediately bought up
by the above statesmen, except one copy, which is now for DIS-
POSAL. Apply by letter only.
Here, for the reader's sake, we terminate our quotations.
They might easily have been extended through the whole
of the present number of this Journal.
We believe that a State Funeral at this time of day —
apart from the mischievously confusing effect it has on the
general mind, as to the necessary union of funeral expense
and pomp with funeral respect, and the consequent injury it
may do to the cause of a great reform most necessary for
the benefit of all classes of society — is, in itself, so plainly a
pretence of being what it is not : is so unreal, such a substitu-
tion of the form for the substance: is so cut and dried, and
stale : is such a palpably got up theatrical trick : that it puts
the dread solemnity of death to flight, and encourages these
shameless traders in their dealings on the very coffin-lid of
departed greatness. That private letters and other
memorials of the great Duke of Wellington would still have
been advertised and sold, though he had been laid in his
grave amid the silent respect of the whole country with the
simple honours of a military commander, we do not doubt;
but that, in that case, the traders would have been discour-
aged from holding anything like this Public Fair and Great
Undertakers' Jubilee over his remains, we doubt as little. It
is idle to attempt to connect the frippery of the Lord Cham-
326
berlain's Office and the Herald's College, with the awful
passing away of that vain shadow in which man walketh and
disquieteth himself in vain. There is a great gulf set be-
tween the two which is set there by no mortal hands, and
cannot by mortal hands be bridged across. Does any one
believe that, otherwise, 'the Senate* would have been 'mourn-
ing its hero' (in the likeness of a French Field-Marshal) on
Tuesday evening, and that the same Senate would have been
in fits of laughter with Mr. Hume on Wednesday afternoon
when the same hero was still in question and unburied?
The mechanical exigencies of this journal render it neces-
sary for these remarks to be written on the evening of the
State Funeral. We have already indicated in these pages
that we consider the State Funeral a mistake, and we hope
temperately to leave the question here for temperate consider-
ation. It is easy to imagine how it may have done much
harm, and it is hard to imagine how it can have done any
good. It is only harder to suppose that it can have afforded
a grain of satisfaction to the immediate descendants of the
great Duke of Wellington, or that it can reflect the faintest
ray of lustre on so bright a name. If it were assumed that
such a ceremonial was the general desire of the English
people, we would reply that that assumption was founded on
a misconception of the popular character, and on a low
estimate of the general sense ; and that the sooner both were
better appreciated in high places, the better it could not fail
to be for us all. Taking for granted at this writing, what
we hope may be assumed without any violence to the truth;
namely, that the ceremonial was in all respects well conducted,
and that the English people sustained throughout, the high
character they have nobly earned, to the shame of their silly
detractors among their own countrymen ; we must yet express
our hope that State Funerals in this land went down to their
tomb, most fitly, in the tasteless and tawdry Car that nodded
and shook through the streets of London on the eighteenth of
November, eighteen hundred and fifty-two. And sure we are,
with large consideration for opposite opinions, that when
History shall rescue that very ugly machine — worthy to pass
under decorated Temple Bar, as decorated Temple Bar was
WHERE WE STOPPED GROWING 337
worthy to receive it — from the merciful shadows of
obscurity, she will reflect with amazement — remembering his
true, manly, modest, self-contained, and genuine character —
that the man who, in making it the last monster of its race,
rendered his last enduring service to the country he had loved
and served so faithfully, was Arthur, Duke of Wellington.
WHERE WE STOPPED GROWING
[JANUARY 1, 1853]
FEW people who have been much in the society of children, are
likely to be ignorant of the sorrowful feeling sometimes
awakened in the mind by the idea of a favourite child's 'grow-
ing up.' This is intelligible enough. Childhood is usually
so beautiful and engaging, that, setting aside the many
subjects of profound interest which it offers to an ordinarily
thoughtful observer; and even settling aside, too, the natural
caprices of strong affection and prepossession; there is a
mournful shadow of the common lot, in the notion of its
changing and fading into anything else. The sentiment is un-
reasoning and vague, and does not shape itself into a wish.
To consider what the dependent little creature would do with-
out us, or in the course of how few years it would be in as
bad a condition as those terrible immortals upon earth, en-
gendered in the gloom of Swift's wise fancy, is not within
the range of so fleeting a thought. Neither does the imagi-
nation then enter into such details as the picturing of child-
hood come to old age, or of old age carried back to childhood,
or of the pretty baby boy arrived at that perplexing state
of immaturity when Mr. Carlyle, in mercy to society, would
put him under a barrel for six years. The regret is tran-
sitory, natural to a short-lived creature in a world of change,
has no hold in the judgment, and so comes and passes away.
But we, the writer, having been conscious of the sensation
the other night — for, at this present season most of us are
much in childish company, and we among he rest — were led
to consider whether there were any things as to which this
338 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
individual We actually did stop growing when we were a
child. We had a fecr that the list would be very short ; but,
on writing it out as follows, were glad to find it longer than
we had expected.
We have never grown the thousandth part of an inch out
of Robinson Crusoe. He fits us just as well, and in exactly
the same way, as when we were among the smallest of the
small. We have never grown out of his parrot, or his dog,
or his fowling-piece, or the horrible old staring goat he
came upon in the cave, or his rusty money, or his cap, or
umbrella. There has been no change in the manufacture of
telescopes, since that blessed ship's spy-glass was made,
through which, lying on his breast at the top of his fortifica-
tion, with the ladder drawn up after him and all made safe,
he saw the black figures of those Cannibals moving round the
fire on the sea-sand, as the monsters danced themselves into
an appetite for dinner. We have never grown out of Fri-
day, or the excellent old father he was so glad to see, or the
grave and gentlemanly Spaniard, or the reprobate Will
Atkins, or the knowing way in which he and those other
mutineers were lured up into the Island when they came
ashore there, and their boat was stove. We have got no
nearer Heaven by the altitude of an atom, in respect of the
tragi-comic bear whom Friday caused to dance upon a tree,
or the awful array of howling wolves in the dismal weather,
who were mad to make good entertainment of man and beast,
and who were received with trains of gunpowder laid on
fallen trees, and fired by the snapping of pistols; and who
ran blazing into the forest darkness, or were blown up
famously. Never sail we, idle, in a little boat, and hear the
rippling water at the prow, and look upon the land, but we
know that our boat-growth stopped for ever, when Robinson
Crusoe sailed round the Island, and, having been nearly lost,
was so affectionately awakened out of his sleep at home again
by that immortal parrot, great progenitor of all the parrots
we have ever known.
Our growth stopped, when the great Haroun Alraschid
spelt his name so, and when nobody had ever heard of a Jin.
When the Sultan of the Indies was a mighty personage, to be
WHERE WE STOPPED GROWING 339
approached respectfully even on the stage; and when all the
dazzling wonders of those many nights held far too high a
place in the imagination to be burlesqued and parodied.
When Blue Beard, condescending to come out of book at all,
came over mountains, to the music of his own march, on an
elephant, and knew no more of slang than of Sanscrit. Our
growth stopped, when Don Quixote might have been right
after all in going about to succour the distressed, and when the
priest and the barber were no more justified in burning his
books than they would have been in making a bonfire of our
own two bedroom shelves. When Gil Bias had a heart, and
was, somehow or other, not at all worldly that we knew of : and
when it was a wonderful accident that the end of that inter-
esting story in the Sentimental Journey, commencing with the
windy night, and the notary, and the Pont Neuf, and the hat
blown off, was not to be found in our Edition though we
looked for it a thousand times.
We have never grown out of the real original roaring
giants. We have seen modern giants, for various considera-
tions ranging from a penny to half-a-crown ; but, they have
only had a head a-piece, and have been merely large men, and
not always that. We have never outgrown the putting to
ourselves of this supposititious case ; Whether, if we, with a
large company of brothers and sisters, had been put in his
(by which we mean, of course, in Jack's) trying situation,
we should have had at once the courage and the presence of
mind to take the golden crowns (which it seems they always
wore as night-caps) off the heads of the giant's children as
they lay a-bed, and put them on our family ; thus causing
our treacherous host to batter his own offspring and spare us.
We have never outgrown a want of confidence in ourselves,
in this particular.
There are real people and places that we have never out-
grown, though they themselves may have passed away long
since : which we always regard with the eye and mind of child-
hood. We miss a tea-tray shop, for many years at the corner
of Bedford Street and King Street, Covent Garden, London,
where there was a tea-tray in the window representing, with
an exquisite Art that we have not outgrown either, the de-
340 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
parture from home for school, at breakfast time, of two boys,
one boy used to it ; the other, not. There was a charming
mother in a bygone fashion, evidently much affected
though trying to hide it; and a little sister, bearing, as we
remember, a basket of fruit for the consolation of the un-
used brother; what time the used one, receiving advice we
opine from his grandmother, drew on his glove in a manner
we once considered unfeeling, but which we were afterwards
inclined to hope might be only his brag. There were some
corded boxes, and faithful servants; and there was a break-
fast-table, with accessories (an urn and plate of toast par-
ticularly) our admiration of which, as perfect illusions, we
never have outgrown and never shall outgrow.
We never have outgrown the whole region of Covent
Garden. We preserve it as a fine, dissipated, insoluble mys^
tery. We believe that the gentleman mentioned in Colman's
Broad Grins still lives in King Street. We have a general
idea that the passages at the Old Hummums lead to groves
of gorgeous bedrooms, eating out the whole of the adjacent
houses : where Chamberlains who have never been in bed them-
selves for fifty years, show any country gentleman who rings
at the bell, at any hour of the night, to luxurious repose
in palatial apartments fitted up after the Eastern manner.
(We have slept there in our time, but that makes no differ-
ence.) There is a fine secrecy and mystery about the Piazza ;
— how you get up to those rooms above it, and what reckless
deeds are done there. (We know some of those apartments
very well, but that does not signify in the least.) We have
not outgrown the two great Theatres. Ghosts of great
names are always getting up the most extraordinary panto-
mimes in them, with scenery and machinery on a tremendous
scale. We have no doubt that the critics sit in the pit of
both houses, every night. Even as we write in our common-
place office, we behold from the window, four young ladies
with peculiarly limp bonnets, and of a yellow or drab style of
beauty, making for the stage-door of the Lyceum Theatre,
in the dirty little fog-choked street over the way. Grown up
wisdom whispers that these are beautiful fairies by night, and
that they will find Fairy Land dirty even to their splashed
WHERE WE STOPPED GROWING 341
skirts, and rather cold and dull (notwithstanding its mixed
gas and daylight), this easterly morning. But, we don't be-
lieve it.
There was a poor demented woman who used to roam about
the City, dressed all in black with cheeks staringly painted,
and thence popularly known as Rouge et Noire; whom we
have never outgrown by the height of a grain of mustard
seed. The story went that her only brother, a Bank-clerk, was
left for death for forgery ; and that she, broken-hearted
creature, lost her wits on the morning of his execution, and
ever afterwards, while her confused dream of life lasted,
flitted thus among the busy money-changers. A story, alas !
all likely enough ; but, likely or unlikely, true or untrue,
never to take other shape in our mind. Evermore she
wanders, as to our stopped growth, among the crowd, and
takes her daily loaf out of the shop-window of the same
charitable baker, and between whiles sits in the old Bank office
awaiting her brother. 'Is he come yet?' Not yet, poor soul.
'I will go walk for an hour and come back.' It is then she
passes our boyish figure in the street, with that strange air of
vanity upon her, in which the comfortable self-sustainment
of sane vanity (God help us all!) is wanting, and with her
wildly-seeking, never resting, eyes. So she returns to his old
Bank office, asking 'Is he come yet?' Not yet, poor soul!
So she goes home, leaving word that indeed she wonders he
has been away from her so long, and that he must come to
her however late at night he may arrive. He will come to
thee, O stricken sister, with thy best friend — foe to the pros-
perous and happy — not to such as thou !
Another very different person who stopped our growth, we
associate with Berners Street, Oxford Street ; whether she was
constantly on parade in that street only, or was ever to be seen
elsewhere, we are unable to say. The White Woman is her
name. She is dressed entirely in white, with a ghastly white
plaiting round her head and face, inside her white bonnet.
She even carries (we hope) a white umbrella. With white*
boots, we know she picks her way through the winter dirt.
She is a conceited old creature, cold and formal in manner,
and evidently went simpering mad on personal grounds alone
342 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
— no doubt because a wealthy Quaker wouldn't marry her.
This is her bridal dress. She is always walking up here, on
her way to church to marry the false Quaker. We observe in
her mincing step and fishy eye that she intends to lead him a
sharp life. We stopped growing when we got at the con-
clusion that the Quaker had had a happy escape of the White
Woman.
We have never outgrown the rugged walls of Newgate, or
any other prison on the outside. All within, is still the same
blank of remorse and misery. We have never outgrown Baron
Trenck. Among foreign fortifications, trenches, counter-
scarps, bastions, sentries, and what not, we always have him,
filing at his chains down in some arched darkness far below,
or taming the spiders to keep him company. We
have never outgrown the wicked old Bastille. Here, in
our mind at this present childish moment, is a distinct
ground-plan (wholly imaginative and resting on no sort of
authority), of a maze of low vaulted passages with small
black doors ; and here, inside of this remote door on the left,
where the black cobwebs hang like a veil from the arch, and
the jailer's lamp will scarcely burn, was shut up, in black
silence through so many years, that old man of the affecting
anecdote, who was at last set free. But, who brought his
white face, and his white hair, and his phantom figure, back
again, to tell them what they had made him — how he had no
wife, no child, no friend, no recognition of the light and air
—and prayed to be shut up in his old dungeon till he died.
We received our earliest and most enduring impressions
among barracks and soldiers, and ships and sailors. We
have outgrown no story of voyage and travel, no love of
adventure, no ardent interest in voyagers and travellers. We
have outgrown no country inn — roadside, in the market-
place, or on a solitary heath ; no country landscape, no windy
hill gide, no old manor-house, no haunted place of any degree,
not a drop in the sounding sea. Though we are equal (on
••trong provocation) to the Lancers, and may be heard of in
the Polka, we have not outgrown Sir Roger de Coverley, or
any country dance in the music book. We hope we have not
outgrown the capacity of being easily pleased with what is
AMUSING POSTERITY 343
meant to please us, or the simple folly of being gay upon
occasion without the least regard to being grand.
Right thankful we are to have stopped in our growth at so
many points — for each of these has a train of its own belong-
ing to it — and particularly with the Old Year going out and
the New Year coming in. Let none of us be ashamed to feel
this gratitude. If we can only preserve ourselves from grow-
ing up, we shall never grow old, and the young may love us
to the last. Not to be too wise, not to be too stately, not
to be too rough with innocent fancies, or to treat them with
too much lightness — which is as bad— are points to be re-
membered that may do us all good in our years to come. And
the good they do us, may even stretch forth into the vast
expanse beyond those years ; for, this is the spirit inculcated
by One on whose knees children sat confidingly, and from
whom all our years dated.
PROPOSALS FOR AMUSING POSTERITY
[FEBRUARY 12, 1853]
POSTERITY, that ancient personage yet unborn, is at times a
topic of much speculation with me. I consider him in
a variety of lights, and represent him to myself in many odd
humours, but principally in those with which he is likely to
regard the present age. I am particularly fond of inquiring
whether we contribute our share towards the entertainment
and diversion of the old gentleman. It is important that we
should, for all work and no play would make even Posterity a
dull boy.
And, good Heaven, to think of the amount of work he will
have to get through ! Only to read all those books, to contem
plate all those pictures and statues, and to listen to all that
music, so generously bequeathed to him by crowds of admir-
ing legatees through many generations, will be no slight
labour. I doubt if even the poetry written expressly for his
perusal would not be sufficient to addle any other head. The
prodigious spaces of time that his levees will occupy, are over-
344 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
whelming to think of: for how else can he ever receive those
hosts of ladies and gentlemen who have been resolved and de-
termined to go down to him ! Then the numbers of ingeni-
ous inventions he will have to test, prove, and adopt, from
the perpetual motion to the long range, will necessarily con-
sume some of the best years of his life. In hearing Appeals,
though the claims of the Appellants will be in every case as
clear as crystal, it will be necessary for him to sit as long as
twenty Chancellors, though each sat on the woolsack twenty
years. The mere rejection of those swindlers in the various
arts and sciences who basely witnessed any appreciation of
their works, and the folding to his bosom of those worthies
whom mankind were in a combination to discard, will take
time. It is clear that it is reserved for Posterity to be, in
respect of his labours, immeasurably more than the Hercules
of the future.
Hence, it is but moderately considerate to have an eye to
the amusement of this industrious person. If he must be so
overworked, let us at least do something to entertain him —
something even over and above those books of poetry and
prose, those pictures and statues, and that music, for which
he will have an unbounded relish, but perhaps a relish (so I
venture to conceive) of a pensive rather than an exhilarating
kind.
These are my reflections when I consider the present time
with a reference to Posterity. I am sorry to say that I don't
think we do enough to make him smile. It appears to me
that we might tickle him a little more. I will suggest one or
two odd notions— somewhat far-fetched and fantastic, I allow,
but they may serve the purpose — of the kind of practical
humour that might seem droll to Posterity.
If we had had, in this time of ours, two great commanders
—say one by land and one by sea; one dying in battle (or
what was left of him, for we will suppose him to have lost an
arm and an eye or so before), and one living to old age — it
might be a jest for Posterity if we choked our towns with bad
Statues to one of the two, and utterly abandoned and deserted
the memory of the other. We might improve on this conceit.
If we laid those two imaginary great men side by side in
AMUSING POSTERITY 345
Saint Paul's cathedral and then laid side by side in the adver-
tising columns of our public newspapers, two appeals re-
specting two Memorials, one to each of them ; and if we so
carried on the joke as that the Memorial to the one should be
enormously rich, and the Memorial to the other, miserably
poor — as that the subscriptions to the one should include the
names of three-fourths of the grandees of the land, and the
subscriptions to the other but a beggarly account of rank
and file — as that the one should leap with ease into a magnifi-
cent endowment, and the other crawl and stagger as a pauper
provision for the dead Admiral's daughter — if we could only
bring the joke, as Othello says,
* — to this extent, no more';
I think it might amuse Posterity a good deal.
The mention of grandees brings me to my next proposal.
It would involve a change in the present mode of bestowing
public honours and titles in England ; but, encouraged by the
many examples we have before us of disinterested mag-
nanimity in favour of Posterity, we might perhaps be ani-
mated to try it.
I will assume that among the books in that very large
library (for the most part quite unknown at the present be-
nighted time) which will infallibly become the rich inherit-
ance of Posterity, there will be found a history of England.
From that record, Posterity will learn the origin of many
noble families and noble titles. Now the jest I have in
my mind, is this. If we could so arrange matters as that
that privileged class should be always with great jealousy
preserved, and hedged round by a barrier of buckram and a
board of green cloth, which only a few generals, a few great
capitalists, and a few lawyers, should be allowed to scale — the
latter not in a very creditable manner until within the last few
generations : as our amiable friend Posterity will find when he
looks back for the date at which Chief Justices and Puisne
Judges began to be men of undoubted freedom, honour, and
independence — if such privileged class were always watched
and warded and limited, and fended off, in the manner of
hundreds of years ago, and never adapted to the altered cir-
346 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
cumstances of the time ; and if it were in practice set up and
maintained as having been, from Genesis thenceforward, en-
dowed with a superior natural instinct for noble ruling and
governing and Cabinet-making, as triumphantly shown in the
excellent condition of the whole machinery of Government, of
every public office, every dockyard, every ship, every
diplomatic relation, and particularly every colony — I think
there would be a self-evident pleasantry in this that would
make Posterity chuckle. The present British practice being,
as we all know, widely different, we should have many changes
to make before we could hand down this amusing state of
things. For example, it would be necessary to limit the
great Jenner or Vaccination Dukedom and endowment, at
present so worthily represented in the House of Lords, by the
noble and scientific Duke who will no doubt be called upon
(some day or other) to advise Her Majesty in the formation
of a Ministry. The Watt or Steam-Engine peerage would
also require to be gradually abolished. So would the Iron-
Road Earldom, the Tubular Bridge Baronetcy, the Faraday
Order of Merit, the Electric Telegraph Garter, the titles at
present held by distinguished writers on literary grounds
alone, and the similar titles held by painters ; — though it
might point the joke to make a few Academicians equal in
rank to an alderman. But, the great practical joke once
played off, of entirely separating the ennobled class from the
various orders of men who attain to social distinction by mak-
ing their country happier, better, and more illustrious among
nations, we might be comfortably sure, as it seems to me— and
as I now humbly submit— of having done something to
amuse Posterity.
Another thing strikes me. Our venerable friend will find
in that English history of his, that, in comparatively barbar-
ous times, when the Crown was poor, it did anything for
money — commuted murder, or anything else — and that,
partly of this desperate itching for gold, and partly of par-
tial laws in favour of the feudal rich, a most absurd and
obsolete punishment, called punishment by fine, had its birth.
Now, it appears to me, always having an eye on the enter-
tainment of Posterity, that if while we proclaimed the laws
AMUSING POSTERITY 347
to be equal against all offenders, we would only preserve this
obsolete punishment by fine — of course no punishment what-
ever to those who have money — say in a very bad class of
cases such as gross assaults, we should certainly put Posterity
on the broad grin. Why, we might then even come to this.
A 'captain' might be brought up to a Police Office, charged
with caning a young woman for an absolutely diabolical
reason ; and the offence being proved, the 'captain' might, as
a great example of the equality of the law (but by no fault
in the magistrate, he having no alternative), be fined fifty
shillings, and might take a full purse from his pocket and
offer, if that were all, to make it pounds. And what a joke
that would be for Posterity ! To be done in the face of day,
in the first city upon earth, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-three !
Or, we might have our laws regarding this same offence of
assault in such a facetious state as to empower a workhouse
nurse within two hours' walk of the capital, slowly to torture
a child with fire, and afterwards to walk off from the law's
presence scot free of all pains and penalties, but a fortnight's
imprisonment! And we might so carry out this joke to the
uttermost as that the forlorn child should happily die and rot,
and the barbarous nurse be then committed for trial ; her
horrible offence being legally measured by that one result or
its absence, and not by the agony it caused, and the awful
cruelty it shewed. And all this time (to make the pleasantry
the greater), we might have all manner of watch-towers, in
measurement as near as possible of the altitude of the Tower
of Babel when it was overthrown, erected in all parts of the
kingdom, with all sorts and conditions of men and women
perched on platforms thereupon, looking out for any griev-
ance afar off, East, West, North, and South, night and day.
So should that tender nurse return, gin-solaced, to her
ministration upon babies (imagine the dear matron's ante-
cedents, all ye mothers!), and so should Posterity be made to
laugh, though bitterly !
Indeed, I think Posterity would have such an indifferent
appreciation of this last joke, on account of its intensely
practical character, that it might require another to relieve
348 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
it. And I would suggest that if a body of gentlemen pos-
sessing their full phrenological share of the combative and
antagonistic organs, could only be induced to form themselves
into a society for declaiming about Peace, with a very con-
siderable War- Whoop against all non-declaimers ; and if they
could only be prevailed upon to sum up eloquently the many
unspeakable miseries and horrors of War, and to present
them to their own country as a conclusive reason for its being
undefended against War, and becoming the prey of the first
despot who might choose to inflict those miseries and horrors
upon it, — why then I really believe we should have got to
the very best joke we could hope to have in our whole Com-
plete Jest-Book for Posterity, and might fold our arms and
rest convinced that we had done enough for that discerning
patriarch's amusement.
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN
[APRIL 23, 1853]
FIVE years and a half ago, certain ladies, grieved to think
that numbers of their own sex were wandering about the
streets in degradation, passing through and through the
prisons all their lives, or hopelessly perishing in other ways,
resolved to try the experiment on a limited scale of a Home
for the reclamation and emigration of women. As it was
clear to them that there could be little or no hope in this
country for the greater part of those who might become the
objects of their charity, they determined to receive into their
Home, only those who distinctly accepted this condition : That
they came there to be ultimately sent abroad (whither,
was at the discretion of the ladies) ; and that they also came
there to remain for such length of time as might, according
to the circumstances of each individual case, be considered
necessary as a term of probation, and for instruction in the
means of obtaining an honest livelihood. The object of the
Home was twofold. First, to replace young women who had
already lost their characters and lapsed into guilt, in a situa-
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 349
tion of hope. Secondly, to save other young women who were
in danger of falling into the like condition, and give them an
opportunity of flying from crime when they and it stood
face to face.
The projectors of this establishment, in undertaking it,
were sustained by nothing but the high object of making some
unhappy women a blessing to themselves and others instead
of a curse, and raising up among the solitudes of a new world
some virtuous homes, much needed there, from the sorrow and
ruin of the old. They had no romantic visions or extrava-
gant expectations. They were prepared for many failures
and disappointments, and to consider their enterprise re-
warded, if they in time succeeded with one third or one half
of the cases they received.
As the experience of this small Institution, even under the
many disadvantages of a beginning, may be useful and inter-
esting, this paper will contain an exact account of its progress
and results.
It was (and is) established in a detached house with a
garden. The house was never designed for any such purpose,
and is only adapted to it, in being retired and not imme-
diately overlooked. It is capable of containing thirteen in-
mates besides two Superintendents. Excluding from consid-
eration ten young women now in the house, there have been
received in all, since November eighteen hundred and forty-
seven, fifty-six inmates. They have belonged to no particu-
lar class, but have been starving needlewomen of good char-
acter, poor needlewomen who have robbed their furnished
lodgings, violent girls committed to prison for disturbances
in ill-conducted workhouses, poor girls from Ragged Schools,
destitute girls who have applied at Police offices for relief,
young women from the streets: young women of the same
class taken from the prisons after undergoing punishment
there as disorderly characters, or for shoplifting, or for
thefts from the person : domestic servants who have been se-
duced, and two young women held to bail for attempting
suicide. No class has been favoured more than another ; and
misfortune and distress are a sufficient introduction. It is
not usual to receive women of more than five or six-ajid-
850 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
twenty ; the average age in the fifty-six cases would probably
be about twenty. In some instances there have been great
personal attractions; in others, the girls have been very
homely and plain. The reception has been wholly irrespect-
ive of such sources of interest. Nearly all have been ex-
tremely ignorant.
Of these fifty-six cases, seven went away by their own de-
sire during their probation; ten were sent away for miscon-
duct in the Home ; seven ran away ; three emigrated and re-
lapsed on the passage out; thirty (of whom seven are now
married) on their arrival in Australia or elsewhere, entered
into good service, acquired a good character, and have done so
well ever since as to establish a strong prepossession in favour
of others sent out from the same quarter. It will be seen from
these figures that the failures are generally discovered in the
Home itself, and that the amount of misconduct after the
training and ei :igration, is remarkably small. And it is to
be taken into consideration that many cases are admitted into
the Homo, of which there is, in the outset, very little hope,
but which it is not deemed right to exclude from the experi-
ment.
The Home is managed by two Superintendents. The sec-
ond in order acts under the first, who has from day to day the
supreme direction of the family. On the cheerfulness, quick-
ness, good-temper, firmness, and vigilance of these ladies, and
on their never bickering, the successful working of the estab-
lishment in a great degree depends. Their position is one
of high trust and responsibility, and requires not only an
always accumulating experience, but an accurate observation
of every character about them. The ladies who established
the Home, hold little confidential communication with the in-
mates, thinking the system better administered when it is un-
disturbed by individuals. A committee, composed of a few
gentlemen of experience, meets once a month to audit the
accounts, receive the principal Superintendent's reports, in-
vestigate any unusual occurrence, and see all the inmates sep-
arately. None but the committee are present as they enter
one by one, in order that they may be under no restraint in
anything they wish to say. A complaint from any of them
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 351
is exceedingly uncommon. The history of every inmate,
taken down from her own mouth — usually after she has been
some little time in the Home— is preserved in a book. She
is shown that what she relates of herself she relates in confi-
dence, and does not even communicate to the Superintendents.
She is particularly admonished by no means to communicate
her history to any of the other inmates : all of whom have in
their turns received a similar admonition. And she is encour-
aged to tell the truth, by having it explained to her that noth-
ing in her story but falsehood, can possibly affect her position
in the Home after she has been once admitted.
The work of the Home is thus divided. They rise, both in
summer and winter, at six o'clock. Morning prayers and
scripture reading take place at a quarter before eight.
Breakfast is had immediately afterwards. Dinner at one.
Tea at six. Evening prayers are said at half-past eight.
The hour of going to bed is nine. Supposing the Home to
be full, ten are employed upon the household work; two in
the bedrooms ; two in the general living room ; two in the
Superintendent's rooms; two in the kitchen (who cook) ; two
in the scullery; three at needle-work. Straw-plaiting has
been occasionally taught besides. On washing-days, five are
employed in the laundry, three of whom are taken from the
needle-work, and two are told off from the household work.
The nature and order of each girl's work is changed every
week, so that she may become practically acquainted with the
whole routine of household duties. They take it in turns to
bake the bread which is eaten in the house. In every room,
every Monday morning, there is hung up, framed and glazed,
the names of the girls who are in charge there for the week
and who are, consequently, responsible for its neat condition
and the proper execution of the work belonging to it. This
is found to inspire them with a greater pride in good house-
wifery, and a greater sense of shame in the reverse.
The book-education is of a very plain kind, as they have
generally much to leam in the commonest domestic duties, and
are often singularly inexpert in acquiring them. They read
and write, and cypher. School is held every morning at half-
past ten (Saturday excepted) for two hours. The Superm^
352 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
tendents are the teachers. The times for recreation are halt
an hour between school-time and dinner, and an hour after
dinner; half an hour before tea, and an hour after tea. In
the winter, these intervals are usually employed in light
fancy work, the making of little presents for their friends,
etc. In the fine summer weather they are passed in the gar-
den, where they take exercise, and have their little flower-
beds. In the afternoon and evening, they sit all together at
needlework, and some one reads aloud. The books are care-
fully chosen, but are always interesting.
Saturday is devoted to an extraordinary cleaning up and
polishing of the whole establishment, and to the distribution
of clean clothes; every inmate arranging and preparing her
own. Each girl also takes a bath on Saturday.
On Sundays they go to church in the neighbourhood, some
to morning service, some to afternoon service, some to both.
They are invariably accompanied by one of the Superintend-
ents. Wearing no uniform and not being dressed alike, they
attract little notice out of doors. Their attire is that of re-
spectable plain servants. On Sunday evenings they receive
religious instruction from the principal Superintendent.
They also receive regular religious instruction from a cler-
gyman on one day in every week, and on two days in every
alternate week. They are constantly employed, and always
overlooked.
They are allowed to be visited under the following restric-
tions : if by their parents, once in a month ; if by other rela-
tives or friends, once in three months. The principal Super-
intendent is present at all such interviews, and hears the con-
versation. It is not often found that the girls and their
friends have much to say to one another; any display of
feeling on these occasions is rare. It is generally observed
that the inmates seem rather relieved than otherwise when
the interviews are over.
They can write to relatives, or old teachers, or persons
known to have been kind to them, once a month on application
to the committee. It seldom happens that a girl who has any
person in the world to correspond with, fails to take advantage
of this opportunity. All letters dispatched from the Home
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 353
are read and posted by the principal Superintendent. All
letters received, are likewise read by the Superintendent;
but she does not open them. Every such letter is opened by
the girl to whom it is addressed, who reads it first, in the
Superintendent's presence. It never happens that they wish
to reserve the contents ; they are always anxious to impart
them to her immediately. This seems to be one of their chief
pleasures in receiving letters.
They make and mend their own clothes, but do not keep
them. In many cases they are not for some time to be trusted
with such a charge ; in other cases, when temper is awakened,
the possession of a shawl and bonnet would often lead to an
abrupt departure which the unfortunate creature would ever
afterwards regret. To distinguish between these cases and
others of a more promising nature, would be to make invidious
distinctions, than which nothing could be more prejudicial to
the Home, as the objects of its care are invariably sensitive
and jealous. For these various reasons their clothes are kept
under lock and key in a wardrobe room. They have a great
pride in the state of their clothes, and the neatness of their
persons. Those who have no such pride on their admission,
are sure to acquire it.
Formerly, when a girl accepted for admission had clothes
of her own to wear, she was allowed to be admitted in them,
and they were put by for her; though within the Institution
she always wore the clothing it provides. It was found, how-
ever, that a girl with a hankering ofter old companions rather
relied on these reserved clothes, and that she put them on with
an air, if she went away or were dismissed. They now in-
variably come, therefore, in clothes belonging to the Home,
and bring no other clothing with them. A suit of the
commonest apparel has been provided for the next inmate
who may leave during her probation, or be sent away ; and it
is thought that the sight of a girl departing so disgraced,
will have a good effect on those who remain. Cases of dis-
missal or departure are becoming more rare, however, as the
Home increases in experience, and no occasion for making the
experiment has yet arisen.
When the Home had been opened for some time, it was
354 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
resolved to adopt a modification of Captain Macconnochie's
mark system: so arranging the mark table as to render it
difficult for a girl to lose marks under any one of its heads,
without also losing under nearly all the others. The mark
table is divided into the nine following heads. Truthfulness,
Industry, Temper, Propriety of Conduct and Conversation,
Temperance, Order, Punctuality, Economy, Cleanliness. The
word Temperance is not used in the modern slang acceptation,
but in its enlarged meaning as defined by Johnson, from the
English of Spenser: 'Moderation, patience, calmness, sedate-
ness, moderation of passion/ A separate account for every
day is kept with every girl as to each of these items. If her
conduct be without objection, she is marked in each column,
three — excepting the truthfulness and temperance columns,
in which, saving under extraordinary circumstances, she is
only marked two: the temptation to err in those particulars,
being considered low under the circumstances of the life
she leads in the Home. If she be particularly deserving under
any of the other heads, she is marked the highest number —
four. If her deserts be low, she is marked only one, or not
marked at all. If her conduct under any head have been,
during the day, particularly objectionable, she receives a bad
mark (marked in red ink, to distinguish it at a glance from the
others) which destroys forty good marks. The value of the
good marks is six shillings and sixpence per thousand; the
earnings of each girl are withheld until she emigrates, in order
to form a little fund for her first subsistence on her disem-
barkation. The inmates are found, without an exception, to
value their marks highly. A bad mark is very infrequent,
and occasions great distress in the recipient and great excite-
ment in the community. In case of dismissal or premature
departure from the Home, all the previous gain in marks is
forfeited. If a girl be ill through no fault of her own, she
is marked, during her illness, according to her average mark-
ing. But, if she be ill through her own act (as in a recent
case, where a girl set herself on fire, through carelessness and
a violation of the rules of the house) she is credited with no
marks until she is again in a condition to earn them. The
usual earnings in a year are about equal to the average wages
of the commoner class of domestic servant.
They are usually brought to the Home by the principal
Superintendent in a coach. From wheresoever they come,
they generally weep on the road, and are silent and de-
pressed. The average term of probation is about a year ;
longer when the girl is very slow to learn what she is taught.
When the time of her emigration arrives, the same lady ac-
companies her on board ship. They usually go out, three or
four together, with a letter of recommendation to some in-
fluential person at their destination ; sometimes they are placed
under the charge of a respectable family of emigrants ; some-
times they act as nurses or as servants to individual ladies
with children on board. In these capacities they have given
great satisfaction. Their grief at parting from the Super-
intendent is always strong, and frequently of a heart-rending
kind. They are also exceedingly affected by their separation
from the Home ; usually going round and round the garden
first, as if they clung to every tree and shrub in it. Nev-
ertheless, individual attachments among them are rare, though
strong affections have arisen when they have afterwards en-
countered in distant solitudes. Some touching circumstances
have occurred, where unexpected recognitions of this kind
have taken place on Sundays in lonely churches to which the
various members of the little congregations have repaired
from great distances. Some of the girls now married have
chosen old companions thus encountered for their bridesmaids,
and in their letters have described their delight very patheti-
cally.
A considerable part of the needle-work done in the Home
is necessary to its own internal neatness, and the preparation
of outfits for the emigrants ; especially as many of the inmates
know little or nothing of such work, and have it all to learn.
But, as they become more dexterous, plain work is taken in,
and the proceeds are applied as a fund to defray the cost of
outfits. The outfits are always of the simplest kind. Noth-
ing is allowed to be wasted or thrown away in the Home.
From the bones, and remnants of food, the girls are taught
356 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
to make soup for the poor and sick. This at once extends
their domestic knowledge, and preserves their sympathy for
the distressed.
Some of the experiences, not already mentioned, that have
been acquired in the management of the Home are curious, and
perhaps deserving of consideration in prisons and other insti-
tutions. It has been observed, in taking the histories — espe-
cially of the more artful cases — that nothing is so likely to
elicit the truth as a perfectly imperturbable face, and an
avoidance of any leading question or expression of opinion.
Give the narrator the least idea what tone will make her an
object of interest, and she will take it directly. Give her
none, and she will be driven on the truth, and in most cases
will tell it. For similar reasons it is found desirable always
to repress stock religious professions and religious phrases ; to
discourage shows of sentiment, and to make their lives practi-
cal and active. 'Don't talk about it — do it !' is the motto of
the place. The inmates find everywhere about them the
same kind, discriminating firmness, and the same determi-
nation to have no favourite subjects, or favourite objects,
of interest. Girls from Ragged Schools are not generally
so impressible as reduced girls who have failed to sup-
port themselves by hard work, or as women from the
streets — probably, because they have suffered less. The
poorest of the Ragged School condition, who are odi-
ous to approach when first picked up, invariably af-
fect afterwards that their friends are 'well off.' This
psychological curiosity is considered inexplicable. Most
of the inmates are depressed at first. At holiday times the
more doubtful part of them usually become restless and un-
certain; there would also appear to be, usually, a time of
"onsiderable restlessness after six or eight months. In any
little difficulty, the general feeling is invariably with the
establishment and never with the offender. When a girl is
discharged for misconduct, she is generally in deep distress,
and goes away miserably. The rest will sometimes intercede
for her with tears; but it is found that firmness on this and ev-
•ry point, when a decision is once taken, is the most humane
course as having a wholesome influence on the greatest number.
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 357
For this reason, a mere threat of discharge is never on any ac-
count resorted to. Two points of management are extremely
important ; the first, to refer very sparingly to the past ; the
second, never to treat the inmates as children. They must
never be allowed to suppose it possible that they can get the
better of the management. Judicious commendation, when
it is deserved, has a very salutary influence. It is also found
that a serious and urgent entreaty to a girl, to exercise her
self-restraint on some point (generally temper) on which her
mark-table shews her to be deficient, often has an excellent
effect when it is accompanied with such encouragement as,
'You know how changed you are since you have been here;
you know we have begun to entertain great hopes of you.
For God's sake consider! Do not throw away this great
chance of your life, by making yourself and everybody around
you unhappy — which will oblige us to send you away — but
conquer this. Now, try hard for a month, and pray let us
have no fault to find with you at the end of that time.' Many
will make great and successful efforts to control themselves,
after such remonstrance. In all cases, the fewest and plain-
est words are the best. When new to the place, they are
found to break and spoil through great carelessness. Pa-
tience, and the strictest attention to order and punctuality,
will in most cases overcome these discouragements. Nothing
else will. They are often rather disposed to quarrel among
themselves, particularly in bad weather when their lives are
necessarily monotonous and confined; but, on the whole,
allowing for their different breeding, they perhaps quarrel
less than the average of passengers in the state cabin on a
voyage out to India.
As some of the inmates of the Home have to be saved and
guarded from themselves more than from any other people,
they can scarcely be defended by too many precautions.
These precautions are not obtruded upon them, but are
strictly observed. Keys are never left about. The garden
gate is always kept locked ; but the girls take it in turn to act
as porteress, overlooked by the second superintendent. They
are proud of this trust. Any inmate missing from her
usual place for ten minutes would be looked after. Any
358 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
suspicious circumstance would be quickly and quietly investi-
gated. As no girl makes her own bed, no girl has the oppor-
tunity of safely hiding any secret correspondence, or any-
thing else, in it. Each inmate has a separate bed, but
there are several beds in a room. The occupants of each room
are always arranged with reference to their several characters
and counteracting influences. A girl declaring that she
wishes to leave, is not allowed to do so hastily, but is locked
in a chamber by herself, to consider of it until next day:
when, if she still persist, she is formally discharged. It has
never once happened that a girl, however excited, has re-
fused to submit to this restraint.
One of the most remarkable effects of the Home, even in
many of the cases where it does not ultimately succeed, is the
extraordinary change it produces in the appearance of its
inmates. Putting out of the question their look of cleanli-
ness and health (which may be regarded as a physical conse-
quence of their treatment) a refining and humanising altera-
tion is wrought in the expression of the features, and in
the whole air of the person, which can scarely be imagined.
Teachers in Ragged Schools have made the observation in ref-
erence to young women whom they had previously known well,
and for a long time. A very sagacious and observant police
magistrate, visiting a girl before her emigration who had
been taken from his bar, could detect no likeness in her to the
girl he remembered. It is considered doubtful whether, in
the majority of the worst cases, the subject would easily be
known again at a year's end, among a dozen, by an old
companion.
The moral influence of the Home, still applying the remark
even to cases of failure, is illustrated in a no less remarkable
manner. It has never had any violence done to a chair or
a stool. It has never been asked to render any aid to the one
lady and her assistant, who are shut up with the thirteen the
year round. Bad language is so uncommon, that its utter-
ance is an event. The committee have never heard the least
approach to it, or seen anything but submission ; though it
has often been their task to reprove and dismiss women who
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 359
have been violently agitated, and unquestionably (for the
time) incensed against them. Four of the fugitives have
robbed the Institution of some clothes. The rest had no
reason on earth for running away in preference to asking to
be dismissed, but shame in not remaining.
A specimen or two of cases of success may be interesting.
Case number twenty-seven, was a girl supposed to be of
about eighteen, but who had none but supposititious knowl-
edge of her age, and no knowledge at all of. her birthday.
Both her parents had died in her infancy. She had been
brought up in the establishment of that amiable victim of
popular prejudice, the late Mr. Drouet, of Tooting. It did
not appear that she was naturally stupid, but her intellect
had been so dulled by neglect that she was in the Home many
months before she could be imbued with a thorough under-
standing that Christmas Day was so called as the birthday of
Jesus Christ. But when she acquired this piece of learning,
she was amazingly proud of it. She had been apprenticed
to a small artificial flower maker with three others. They
were all ill-treated, and all seemed to have run away at differ-
ent times: this girl last: who absconded with an old man, a
hawker, who brought 'combs and things' to the door for sale.
She took what she called 'some old clothes' of her mistress
with her, and was apprehended with the old man, and they
were tried together. He was acquitted; she was found
guilty. Her sentence was six months' imprisonment, and, on
its expiration, she was received into the Home. She was
appallingly ignorant, but most anxious to learn, and con-
tended against her blunted faculties with a consciously slow
perseverance. She showed a remarkable capacity for copy-
ing writing by the eye alone, without having the least idea of
its sound, or what it meant. There seemed to be some anal-
ogy between her making letters and her making artificial
flowers. She remained in the Home, bearing an excellent
character, about a year. On her passage out, she made
artificial flowers for the ladies on board, earned money, and
was much liked. She obtained a comfortable service as soon
as she landed, and is happy and respected. This girl had
360
not a friend in the world, and had never known a natural
affection, or formed a natural tie, upon the face of this
earth.
Case number thirteen was a half-starved girl of eighteen
whose father had died soon after her birth, and who had
long eked out a miserable subsistence for herself and a sick
mother by doing plain needlework. At last her mother died
in a workhouse, and the needlework 'falling off bit by bit,'
this girl suffered, for nine months, every extremity of dire
distress. Being one night without any food or shelter from
the weather, she went to the lodging of a woman who had
once lived in the same house with herself and her mother, and
asked to be allowed to lie down on the stairs. She was re-
fused, and stole a shawl which she sold for a penny. A
fortnight afterwards, being still in a starving and houseless
state, she went back to the same woman's, and preferred the
same request. Again refused, she stole a bible from her,
which she sold for twopence. The theft was immediately
discovered, and she was taken as she lay asleep in the casual
ward of a workhouse. These facts were distinctly proved
upon her trial. She was sentenced to three months' impris-
onment, and was then admitted into the Home. She has
never been corrupted. She remained in the Home, bearing
an excellent character, a little more than a year ; emigrated ;
conducted herself uniformly well in a good situation; and is
now married.
Case number forty-one was a pretty girl of a quiet and
good manner, aged nineteen. She came from a watering-
place where she had lived with her mother until within a
couple of years, when her mother married again and she
was considered an incumbrance at a very bad home. She
became apprenticed to a dressmaker, who, on account of
staying out beyond the prescribed hours one night when she
went with some other young people to a Circus, positively re-
fused to admit her or give her any shelter from the streets.
The natural consequences of this unjustifiable behaviour
followed. She came to the Home on the recommendation of
a clergyman to whom she fortunately applied, when in a state
of sickness and misery too deplorable to be even suggested
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 361
to the reader's imagination. She remained in the Home (with
an interval of hospital treatment) upwards of a year and a
half, when she was sent abroad. Her character is irreproach-
able, and she is industrious, happy and full of gratitude.
Case number fifty was a very homely, clumsy, ignorant
girl, supposed to be about nineteen, but who again had no
knowledge of her birthday. She was taken from a Ragged
School ; her mother had died when she was a little girl ; and
her father, marrying again, had turned her out of doors,
though her mother-in-law had been kind to her. She had
been once in prison for breaking some windows near the
Mansion House, 'having nowheres as you can think of, to go
to.' She had never gone wrong otherwise, and particularly
wished that 'to be wrote down.' She was in as dirty and
unwholesome a condition, on her admission, as she could well
be, but was inconsolable at the idea of losing her hair, until
the fortunate suggestion was made that it would grow more
luxuriantly after shaving. She then consented, with many
tears, to that (in her case) indispensable operation. This
deserted and unfortunate creature, after a short period of
depression began to brighten, uniformly showed a very honest
and truthful nature, and after remaining in the Home a year,
has recently emigrated; a thoroughly good plain servant,
with every susceptibility for forming a faithful and affec-
tionate attachment to her employers.
Case number fifty-eight was a girl of nineteen, all but
starved through inability to live by needlework. She had
never gone wrong, was gradually brought into a good bodily
condition, invariably conducted herself well, and went abroad,
rescued and happy.
Case number fifty-one was a little ragged girl of sixteen
or seventeen, as she said; but of very juvenile appearance.
She was put to the bar at a Police Office, with two much older
women, regular vagrants, for making a disturbance at the
workhouse gate on the previous night on being refused relief.
She had been a professed tramp for six or seven years, knew
of no relation, and had had no friends but one old woman,
whose very name she did not appear to be sure of. Her
father, a scaffold builder, she had 'lost' on London Bridge
862 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
when she was ten or eleven years old. There appeared little
doubt that he had purposely abandoned her, but she had no
suspicion of it. She had long been hop-picking in the hop
season, and wandering about the country at all seasons, and
was unaccustomed to shoes, and had seldom slept in a bed.
She answered some searching questions without the least re-
serve, and not at all in her own favour. Her appearance of
destitution was in perfect keeping with her story. This girl
was received into the Home. Within a year, there was cling-
ing round the principal Superintendent's neck, on board a
ship bound for Australia — in a state of grief at parting that
moved the bystanders to tears — a pretty little neat modest
useful girl, against whom not a moment's complaint had been
made, and who had diligently learnt everything that had been
set before her.
Case number fifty-four, a good-looking young woman of
two-and-twenty, was first seen in prison under remand on a
charge of attempting to commit suicide. Her mother had
died before she was two years old, and her father had married
again; but she spoke in high and affectionate terms both of
her father and her mother-in-law. She had been a travelling
maid with an elderly lady, and, on her mistress going to
Russia, had returned home to her father's. She had stayed
out late one night, in company with a 'commissioner' whom
she had known abroad, was afraid or ashamed to go home, and
so went wrong. Falling lower, and becoming poorer, she
became at last acquainted with a ticket-taker at a railway
station, who tired of the acquaintance. One night when he
had made an appointment (as he had often done before) and,
on the plea of inability to leave his duties, had put this girl
in a cab, that she might be taken safely home (she seemed to
have inspired him with that much enduring regard), she
pulled up the window and swallowed two shillings' worth of
the essential oil of almonds which she had bought at a chem-
ist's an hour before. The driver happened to look round
when she still had the bottle to her lips, immediately made
out the whole story, and had the presence of mind to drive
her straight to a hospital, where she remained a month before
she was cured. She was in that state of depression in the
HOME FOR HOMELESS WOMEN 363
prison, that it was a matter for grave consideration whether
it would be safe to take her into the Home, where, if she were
bent upon committing suicide, it would be almost impossible
to prevent her. After some talk with her, however, it was
decided to receive her. She proved one of the best inmates it
has ever had, and remained in it seven months before she
emigrated. Her father, who had never seen her since the
night of her staying out late, came to see her in the Home,
and confirmed these particulars. It is doubtful whether any
treatment but that pursued in such an institution would have
restored this girl.
Case number fourteen was an extremely pretty girl of
twenty, whose mother was married to a second husband — a
drunken man who ill-treated his step-daughter. She had
been engaged to be married, but had been deceived, and had
run away from home in shame, and had been away three
years. Within that period, however, she had twice returned
home; the first time for six months; the second time for a
few days. She had also been in a London hospital. She had
also been in the Magdalen : which institution her father-in-law,
with a drunkard's inconsistency, had induced her to leave, to
attend her mother's funeral — and then ill-treated her as be-
fore. She had been once in prison as a disorderly character,
and was received from the prison into the Home. Her health
was impaired and her experiences had been of a bad kind in
a bad quarter of London, but she was still a girl of remark-
ably engaging and delicate appearance. She remained in
the Home, improving rapidly, thirteen months. She was
never complained of, and her general deportment was unusu-
ally quiet and modest. She emigrated, and is a good, in-
dustrious, happy wife.
This paper can scarely be better closed than by the follow-
ing pretty passage from a letter of one of the married
young women.
HONNOURED LADIES,
I have again taken the liberty of writing to you to let
you know how I am going on since I last wrote Home for I
can never forget that name that still comes fresh to my mind,
Honnoured Ladies I received your most kind letter on Tuesday
364 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the 21st of May my Mistress was kind enough to bring it over
to me she told me that she also had a letter from you and that
she should write Home and give you a good account of us. Hon-
noured Ladies I cannot describe the feelings which I felt on
receiving your most kind letter, I first read my letter then I
cried but it was with tears of joy, to think you was so kind to
write to us Honnoured Ladies I have seen Jane and I showed
my letter and she is going write Home, she is living about 36
miles from where I live and her and her husband are very happy
together she has been down to our Town this week and it is the
first that we have seen of her since a week after they were mar-
ried. My Husband is very kind to me and we live very happy
and comfortable together we hare a nice garden where we grow
all that we want we have sown some peas turnips and I helped
to do some we have three such nice pigs and we killed one last
week he was so fat that he could not see out of his eyes he
used to have to sit down to eat and I have got such a nice cat
— she peeps over me while I am writing this. My Husband was
going out one day, and he heard that cat cry and he fetched her
in she was so thin. My tow little birds are gone — one dide and
the other flew away now I have got none, get down Cat do.
My Husband has built a shed at the side of the house to do
any thing for hisself when he corns home from work of a night
he tells me that I shall every 9 years com Home if we live so
long please God, but 1 think thaf he is only making game of me.
Honnoured Ladies I can never feel grateful enough for your
kindness to me and the kind indulgences which I received at my
happy Home, I often wish that I could come Home and see that
happy place again once more and all my kind friends which I
hope I may one day please God.
No comments or arguments shall be added to swell the
length this account has already attained. Our readers witt
judge for themselves what some of these cases must have soon
become, but for the timely interposition of the Home estab-
lished by the Ladies whose charity is so discreet and so im-
partial.
THE SPIRIT BUSINESS 365
THE SPIRIT BUSINESS
[MAY 7, 1853]
PERSONS of quality, and others, who visit the various 'gifted
media' now in London, or receive those supernaturally en-
dowed ladies at their own houses, may be glad to hear how the
spirit business has been doing in America. Two numbers of
The Spiritual Telegraph, a newspaper published in New
York, and 'devoted to the illustration of spiritual intercourse,'
having fallen into our hands, we are happy to have some
means from head-quarters of gratifying the laudable curi-
osity of these philosophical inquirers.
In the first place, it is gratifying to know that the second
volume of that admirable publication, The Shekinah, was ad-
vertised last Fall, containing 'Psychometrical sketches of
living characters given by a lady while in the waking state,
who derives her impressions by holding a letter from the un-
known person against her forehead.' To this remarkable
journal, 'several distinguished minds in Europe are expected
to contribute occasionally.' It appears, however, scarcely to
meet with sufficient terrestrial circulation ; the editor being
under the necessity of inquiring in capitals, 'SHALL IT HAVE A
PATRONAGE WORTHY OF ITS OBJECTS AND ITS CHARACTER?'
We also observe with pleasure the publication of a fourth
edition of 'The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine and others, to
the sixth circle in the Spirit World, by the Reverend Charles
Hammond, Medium, written by the spirit of Thomas Paine
without Volition on the part of the medium.'
Also the following publications: 'A Chart exhibiting an
outline of progressive history, and approaching destiny of
the race. A. J. D. Can be sent by mail.' 'The Philosophy
of Spiritual Intercourse. Light from the Spirit World,
comprising a Series of Articles on the Condition of Spirits
and the development of mind in the Rudimental and Second
Spheres ; being written by the controul of Spirits.' We are
further indebted to a gentleman — we presume a mortal — of
the name of Coggshall, for 'The Signs of the Times, com-
366 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
prising a History of the Spirit Rappings in Cincinnati and
other places.' The Reverend Adin Ballou has been so
obliging as to favour the world with his 'Spirit Manifesta-
tions'; and a Medium, of the gentle name of Ambler, has
produced the 'Spiritual Teacher,' from the dictation of a
little knot of choice spirits of the sixth circle.
As a counterpoise to the satisfaction these spiritual literary
announcements are calculated to inspire, we regret to per-
ceive that some men have been at their old work of blinking
at the light. This melancholy fact is made known to us
through the 'medium' of a paragraph, headed 'BEHIND THE
DOOR'; from which we learn with indignation that 'a good
Presbyterian brother in Newtown, Conn.': with that want of
moral courage which is unhappily characteristic of the m.an,
is accustomed to read The Telegraph in that furtive situa-
tion, bringing down upon himself the terrible apostrophe,
'Read on, brother, until thy spirit shall receive strength suf-
ficient to enable thee to crawl from thy hiding-place.' On
the other hand it is a consolation to know that 'we have, out
in Ohio, a little girl who writes fonography interspersed with
celestial characters.' We have also 'Mrs. S., a gifted friend,'
who writes, 'I may at some future time draw upon the store-
house of memory for some Spiritual facts which have long
slumbered there ; fearing the scoff of the skeptic has hitherto
kept me silent, but I believe there is a time now dawning
upon us when we shall no longer hide the light given us, under
a bushel.' This gifted lady is supplied with a number of pa-
pers, but has none that she greets so cordially as The Tele-
graph, which is 'loaned' her by a friend. 'It ministers,' says
she, modestly, 'to my spiritual and higher nature which craves
a kindred aliment, and which, in past years, has nearly starved
on the husks and verbiage dressed up by the sensuous and un-
believing in spiritual illumination.' Mrs. Fish and the Misses
Fox were, at the date of these advices, to be heard of, we re-
joice to state, at number seventy-eight, West Twenty-Sixth
Street, where those estimable ladies 'entertain strangers' on
three evenings in the week from eight to ten. The enlarged
liberality of Mr. Partridge, who addressed THE NEW YORK
CONFERENCE FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF SPIRITUAL PHE-
THE SPIRIT BUSINESS 367
NOMENA, is worthy of all imitation, and proves him to be
game indeed. Mr. P. was of opinion, when last heard of,
that 'the Devil should have his due,' and that if he (the Devil)
were found engaged in the spirit business, then let them
'stretch forth the right hand of fellowship, and let joy re-
sound through earth and heaven at the conversion of the
Prince of Evil.'
The following explicit and important communications had
been received from spirits — the exalted and improving char-
acter of the announcements, evidently being a long way be-
yond mortality, and requiring special spiritual revelation.
FROM A SPIRIT, BY NAME JOHN COLLINSWORTH
'Who can say it, "I am free as God made"? My dear friends,
it is sometimes very difficult to express our sentiments in
words. What matter who speak so long as you feel a witness
in your own souls, that what is said, is said to benefit man-
kind and advance the truth. Why, my dear friends, my soul
is filled with love towards you. I daily lift my desires to the
Divine Giver of every good thing for your welfare and
eternal happiness in the life to come. I will strive to watch
over you as a circle.'
FROM A SPIRIT, BY NAME ANN BILLINGS
'I have long taken a deep interest in the progress of this
circle. I have called a circle together, and now imagine your
guardian spirits assembled in a circle encircling your circle,
willing and anxious to gratify your every wish ; you must sus-
pend your judgment and wait patiently for further develop-
ments, which will set believers right.'
FROM AN ANONYMOUS SPIRIT, PRESUMED TO BE OF THE QUAKER
PERSUASION
'Dear John, it is a pleasure to address thee now and then,
after a lapse of many years. This new mode of conversing
is no less interesting to thy mother than to thee. It greatly
adds to the enjoyment and happiness of thy friends here to
368 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
see thee happy, looking forward with composure to the change
from one sphere to another.'
FKOM A SPIRIT, BY NAME LORENZO DOW
*I will add a little to what has already been said. Keep
calm — let skeptics scoff — bigots rave — the press ridicule —
keep an eye on the pulpit, there will be a mighty onslaught
by the clergy soon ; hew straight, keep cool, and welcome them
into your ranks.'
Upon the general question we observe that an eminent man
with the singular title of Bro Hewitt attended a meeting at
Boston, where there was some speaking from, or through,
the mediums, which, 'although not according to the common
rules or order of speaking, was nevertheless of an interesting
character in its thought, as well as in the novelty of its
method. Two young men were the speaking mediums alluded
to, who have never spoken in public before they were thus
moved to do it.' Bro Hewitt does not mention, that the spir-
its began this particular revelation with the startling and
novel declaration that they were unaccustomed to public
speaking; but it appears probable. The spirits were assailed
(as was only to be expected), by the Boston press, and Bro
Hewitt is of opinion that 'such a tissue of falsehood, slang,
and abuse, was never before expressed in so eminently laconic
and classic a style since Protestant Methodism began with S.
F. Norris.' At the Boston Melodeon, a large audience had
assembled to hear Theodore Parker ; but in lieu of that in-
spired person, 'the desk was supplied by the celebrated An-
drew Jackson Davis.' One lady was much surprised to find
this illustrious individual so young; he being only twenty-
five and having a higher forehead than Mr. Sunderland, the
mesmeriser ; but wearing 'a similarly savage-looking beard and
moustache.' His text was 'All the World 's a Stage' ; and he
merely 'wished to propose a new philosophy, which, unlike
the theology of the Testaments should be free from inconsis-
tencies, and tend to perfect harmony.' Our game friend
Partridge had remarked in solemn conference that 'some seek
to protect themselves from conflicting communications, by
THE SPIRIT BUSINESS 369
refusing to hearken to any spirit unless he claims to hail from
the sixth or seventh sphere.' Mr. Thomas Hutching, 'a ven-
erable Peracher,' whatever that may be, 'of forty years' stand-
ing,' had been 'overwhelmed* by the rapping medium, Mrs.
Fish ; and the venerable Peracher had not recovered when last
heard of. The Reverend Charles Hammond, medium, had
communicated the following important facts : 'I. All spirits
are good and not evil. There is no evil spirit on earth or in
this sphere. God nor nature never made an evil spirit. II.
There is no condition of spirit lower than the rudimental.
Earth has the lowest order, and the darkest sphere. Hell is
not a correct word to convey the proper idea of the compara-
tive condition of spirits in different circles. And III. A cir-
cle is not a space but a development,' — which piece of infor-
mation we particularly recommend to the reader's considera-
tion as likely to do him good.
We find that our American friends, with that familiar
nomenclature which is not uncommon among them, have
agreed to designate one branch of the spiritual proceedings
as 'Tippings.' We did at first suppose this expressive word
to be 6f English growth, and to refer to the preliminary
'tipping' of the medium, which is found to be indispensable
to the entertainments on this side of the Atlantic. We have
discovered, however, that it denotes the spiritual movements of
the tables and chairs, and of a mysterious piece of furniture
called a 'stand,' which appears to be in every apartment.
The word has passed into current use, insomuch that one cor-
respondent writes : 'The other evening, as myself and a party
of friends were entertaining ourselves with the tippings,' — and
so on.
And now for a few individual cases of spiritual manifesta-
tion : —
There was a horrible medium down in Philadelphia, who
recorded of herself, 'Whenever I am passive, day or night, my
hand writes.' This appalling author came out under the fol-
lowing circumstances: — 'A pencil and paper were lying on
the table. The pencil came into my hand ; my fingers were
clenched on it! An unseen iron grasp compressed the ten-
dons of my arms — my hand was flung violently forward on
370 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the paper, and I wrote meaning sentences without any inten-
tion, or knowing what they were to be.' The same prolific
person presently inquires, 'Is this Insanity?' To which we
take the liberty of replying, that we rather think it is.
R. B. Barker had been subject to a good deal of 'telegraph-
ing by the spirits.' The death of U. J. had been predicted
to him, and a fluttering of ethereal creatures, resembling
pigeons, had taken place in his bedroom. After this super-
natural poultry took flight, U. J. died. Other circumstances
had occurred to R. B. Barker, 'which he might relate,' but
which were 'of such a nature as to preclude exposure' at that
present writing.
D. J. Mandell had had the following experience. 'I was
invited to conduct a sitting at a neighbour's, with reference
to affording an opportunity to a young clergyman to wit-
ness something of the manifestations. A name was here
spelled out which none of the family recognised, and of which
the said young clergyman at first denied any knowledge. I
called for a message, and this was given: "Believe this is
•spiritual." Thinking it singular that no relative of the fam-
ily, and especially that no one whom the young minister could
remember, should announce himself, I inquired if the spirit
of any of his friends were present. Almost before the re-
sponse could be given, he spoke sharply, and said, "I wish
not to hear from any of my friends through any such means."
I found there was considerable pride and prejudice aboard the
little man, and pretty strongly suspected that there was more
in the announcement of that name than he was willing to
acknowledge. After considerable conversation, direct and in-
direct, he confessed to a knowledge of the person whose name
had been given as aforesaid: it was that of a black barber
who had died some time before, and who, during his life-time,
had resided in the clergyman's native village. The latter had
been well acquainted with him, but despised him; and, from
what I could make out of the manifestation, take it all in all,
I judged that his spiritual friends were present to communi-
cate with him ; but perceiving his strong repugnance to hear
from his friends through the tippings, they had resolved to
THE SPIRIT BUSINESS 371
shock his self-complacency by putting forward the very one
whom he detested most.'
The following state, described by a gentleman who with-
holds his name, appears to us to indicate a condition, as to
spirits, which is within the experience of many persons. To
point our meaning we italicise a few words :
'On the evening of the fifteenth instant, at the residence of
Dr. Hallock, I was directed through the raps (a medium
being present), to go to the residence of Dr. Gray, and sit in
a circle to be convened for the purpose of seeing an exhibi-
tion of spirit lights. As I had no other invitation I felt ex-
ceeding delicate about complying. I mentioned this to the
power that was giving the direction, and added, as an addi-
tional excuse, that my attendance there on an occasion long
gone by had left an unfavourable impression. Still I was
directed to go. On arriving at Dr. Gray's, I explained the
occasion of my presence, and was admitted to the circle.
Being desirous that my influence should not mar the harmony
of the company, I put forth a strong effort of the will to in-
duce a passiveness in my nervous system ; and, in order that I
might not be deceived as to my success, resigned myself to
sleep. I suppose I was unconscious for thirty min-
utes.' After this, the seer had a vision of stalks and leaves,
*a large species of fruit, somewhat resembling a pine-apple,'
and 'a nebulous column, somewhat resembling the milky way,'
which nothing but spirits could account for, and from which
nothing but soda-water, or time, is likely to have recovered
him. We believe this kind of manifestation is usually fol-
lowed by a severe headache next morning, attended by some
degree of thirst.
A spiritualist residing at Troy, communicates the case of a
lady, which appears to us to be of a nature closely resembling
the last. 'A lady — the wife of a certain officer in a Presby-
terian church — who is a partial believer in spiritual manifes-
tations, was so far under the influence of spirits, that her
hands were moved, and made to perform some very singular
gestures. This new mode of doing business was not very
pleasing to the lady, and caused her to be a little frightened.
372 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
One day, seeing their clergyman, Dr. passing, the latter
was invited in to witness the phenomena, and to render as-
sistance, if possible. As the Doctor entered the room, the
lady shook hands with him cordially, but found it easier to
commence than to leave off. After shaking hands for some
time, the hands commenced patting the Doctor on the shoul-
ders, head and ears, to the confusion of both parties. The
Doctor then advised that the hands be immersed in cold wa-
ter, with a view to disengage the electricity, of which he said
the lady was overcharged. When the water was procured the
motion of the hands became more violent, and manifested a
repugnance to the water-cure. With a little assistance, how-
ever, the hands were finally immersed, when they at once com-
menced throwing the water so plentifully over the Doctor's
head and shoulders, that he was compelled to beat a hasty
retreat, carrying with him the marks of water-baptism at
spirit hands. It is hoped that the Doctor, after this experi-
ence in the Spiritual electrical-fountain-bath will have a little
more charity for his rapping sisters, as he terms them, and
not again assail them from the pulpit as void of common
sense.'
It certainly is very extraordinary that, with such lights as
these, any men can assail their rapping and tipping brothers
and sisters, from any sort of pulpit, as void of common sense.
The spirit business cannot fail to be regarded by all dispas-
sionate persons as the last great triumph of common sense.
These extracts, which we might extend through several
pages, will quite dispose of the objection that there is any
folly or stupidity among the patrons of the spirit business.
As a proof that they are equally free from self-conceit, and
that that little weakness in human nature has nothing to do
with the success of the trade, and is not at all consulted by
the dealers, we will come home to England for a concluding
testimony borne by Mr. Robert Owen. This gentleman, in
a conversation with the spirits of his deceased wife and young-
est daughter, inquired what object they had in view in fa-
vouring him with their company? 'Answer. To reform
the world. Question. Can / materially promote this ob-
ject? Answer. You can assist in promoting it. Question.
A HAUXTED HOUSE 373
Shall I be aided by the spirits to enable me to succeed? An-
swer. Yes. Question. Shall / devote the remainder of my
life to this mission ? Answer. Yes. Question. Shall / hold
a public meeting to announce to the world these proceedings ;
or shall they be made known through the British Parliament?
Answer. Through the British Parliament. Question. Shall
/ also apply for an investigation of this subject to the Con-
gress of the United States? Answer. Yes.' This naturally
brought up the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, of whom Mr.
Owen inquired, 'Have I been assisted in my writings for the
public, by any particular spirit? Answer. Yes. Question.
What spirit? Answer. GOD. (This reply was made in such
a manner as to create a peculiarly awful impression on those
present.) Question. Shall I continue to be assisted by the
same spirit? Answer. Yes.'
We have inquired of Dr. Conolly, and are informed that
there are several philosophers now resident at Hanwell, Mid-
dlesex, and also in Saint George's Fields, Southwark, who,
without any tippings or rappings, find themselves similarly
inspired. But those learned prophets cry aloud in their
wards, and no man regardeth them ; which brings us to the
painful conclusion, that in the Spirit business, as in most
other trades, there are some bankruptcies.
[JULY 23, 1853]
THAT there are on record many circumstantial and minute
accounts of haunted houses, is well known to most people.
But, all such narratives must be received with the greatest
circumspection, and sifted with the utmost care ; nothing in
them must be taken for granted, and every detail proved by
direct and clear evidence, before it can be received. For, if
this course be necessary to the establishment of a philosophi-
cal experiment in accordance with the known laws of nature,
how much more is it necessary in a case where the alleged
truth is opposed to those laws (so far as thev are under-
374
stood), and to the experience of educated mankind? How
much more so, yet, when it is in the nature of the mass of this
class of supernatural stories to resolve themselves into nat-
ural and commonplace affairs on the subtraction or addition
of some slight circumstance equally easy to have been dropped
off, or to have been joined on, in the course of repetition from
mouth to mouth !
We offer this preliminary remark as in fairness due to the
difficulty of the general subject. But, in reference to the
particular case of which, in all its terrors, we are about to
give a short account, we must observe that every circumstance
we shall relate is accurately known to us, is fully guaranteed
by us, and can be proved by a cloud of witnesses taken at
random from the whole country.
The proprietor of the haunted house in question, is a
gentleman of the name of Bull. Mr. Bull is a person of
large property — a long way past the Middle Age, though
some maudlin young people would have persuaded him to the
contrary a little while ago — and possessed of a strong con-
stitution and great common sense. Which, it is needless to
add, is the most uncommon sense in the world.
The house belonging to Mr. Bull, which has acquired an
unenviable notoriety, is situated in the city of Westminster,
and abuts on the river Thames. Mr. Bull was induced to
commence this edifice for the reception of a family already
enlarged by the addition of several new Members, some years
ago, on the destruction of his ancient family mansion by fire.
A variety of remarkable facts have been observed, from the
first, in connexion with this building. Merely as a building,
it is supposed to be impossible that it can ever be finished;
it is predicted and generally believed that the owl will hoot
from the aged ivy clinging to the bases of its towers, many
centuries before the summits of those towers are reared.
When it was originally projected, the sum-total of its cost
was plainly written on the plans, in figures of a reasonable
size. Those figures have since swelled in a most astonishing
manner, and may now be seen in a colossal state. It was yet
mere beams and walls, when extraordinary voices of the
A HAUNTED HOUSE 375
prosiest description arose from its foundations, and resounded
through the city, night and day, unmeaningly demanding
whether Cromwell should have a statue. The voices being
at length hushed by a body of Royal commissioners (among
whom was the member for the University of Oxford, ex officio
powerful, in the Red Sea), new phenomena succeeded. It
was found impossible to warm the edifice; it was found im-
possible to cool it ; and it was found impossible to light it.
The Members of Mr. Bull's family were blown off their seats
by blasts of icy air, and in the same moment fainted from
excess of sickly heat. Ophthalmia raged among them in
consequence of the powerful glare to which their right eyes
were exposed, while their left organs of vision were shrouded
in the darkness of Egypt. Caverns of amazing dimensions
yawned under their feet, whence odours arose, of which the
only consolatory feature was, that no savour of brimstone
could be detected in them. Pale human forms — but for the
most part of exaggerated and unearthly proportions — arose
in the Hall, and (under the name of Cartoons) haunted it a
long time. Among these phantoms, several portentous shades
of ancient Britons were observed, with beards in the latest
German style. Undaunted by these accumulated horrors, Mr.
Bull took possession of his haunted house — and then the dis-
mal work began indeed.
The first supernatural persecution endured by Mr. Bull,
was the sound of a tremendous quantity of oaths. This was
succeeded by the dragging of great weights about the house
at untimely hours, accompanied with fearful noises, such as
shrieking, yelling, barking, braying, crowing, coughing,
fiendish laughter, and the like. Mr. Bull describes this out-
cry as calculated to appal the stoutest heart. But, a gush
of words incessantly pouring forth within the hunted prem-
ises, was even more distressing still. In the dead of the night,
words, words, words — words of laudation, words of vitupera-
tion, words of indignation, words of peroration, words of or-
der, words of disorder ; words, words, words — the same words
in the same weary array, of little or no meaning, over and
over again — resounded in the unhappy gentleman's ears.
376 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The Irish accent was very frequently detectible in these dread-
ful sounds, and Mr. Bull considered it an aggravation of his
misery.
All this time, the strangest and wildest confusion reigned
among the furniture. Seats were overturned and knocked
about ; papers of importance that were laid upon the table,
unaccountably disappeared; large measures were brought in
and dropped; Members of Mr. Bull's family were repeatedly
thrown from side to side, without appearing to know that
they had changed sides at all ; other Members were absurdly
hoisted from surprising distances to foremost benches, where
they tried to hold on tight, but couldn't by any means effect
it ; invisible kicks flew about with the utmost rapidity ; the
seals of Mr. Bull's offices, though of some weight, were tossed
to and fro, like shuttlecocks ; and, in the tumult, Mr. Bull
himself went bodily to the wall, and there remained doubled
up for a considerable period. In addition to these fearful
revels, it was found that a forest growth of cobweb and
fungus, which in the course of many generations had ac-
cumulated in the lobbies and passages of Mr. Bull's old
house, supernaturally sprung up at compound interest in the
lobbies and passages of the new one, which were further in-
fested by swarms of (supposed) unclean spirits that took
refuge in the said growth. Thus was the house further
haunted by what Mr. Bull calls, for the sake of distinction,
'Private Bills,' engendering a continual gabbling and cack-
ling in all the before-mentioned passages and lobbies, as well
as in all the smaller chambers or committee rooms of Mr.
Bull's mansion : and occasioning so much spoliation and cor-
ruption, and such a prodigious waste of money, that Mr.
Bull considers himself annually impoverished to the extent of
many hundreds of thousands of pounds thereby.
At this distressing crisis, it occurred to Mr. Bull, to send
the Members of his family (as it should be understood, his
custom occasionally is) into the country, to be refreshed, and
to get a little change. He thought that if the house stood
empty for a short time, it might possibly become quieter in
the interval ; at any rate he knew that its condition could not
well be worse. He therefore sent them down to various bor-
A HAUNTED HOUSE 377
oughs and counties, and awaited the result with some hope.
But, now the most appalling circumstances connected with
this haunted house, and which, within the compass of our
reading, is unparalleled in any similar case, developed itself
with a fury that had reduced Mr. Bull to the confines of
despair.
For the time, the house itself was quiet. But, dismal to
relate, the great mass of the Members of Mr. Bull's family
carried the most terrific plagues of the house into the coun-
try with them, and seemed to let loose a legion of devils
wheresoever they went. We will take, for the sake of clear-
ness, the borough of Burningshame, and will generally re-
count what happened there, as a specimen of what occurred
in many other places.
A Member of Mr. Bull's family went down to Burning-
shame, with the intention — perfectly innocent in itself — of
taking a pleasant walk over the course there, and getting his
friends to return him by an easy conveyance to Mr. Bull.
But, no sooner had this gentleman arrived in Burningshame,
than the voices and words broke out in every room and bal-
cony of his hotel with a vehemence and recklessness inde-
scribably awful. They made the wildest statements ; they
swore to the most impossible promises; they said and unsaid
fifty things in an hour; they declared black to be white, and
white to be black, without the least appearance of any sense
of shame or responsibility ; and made the hair of the better
part of the population stand on end. All this time, the dirti-
est mud in the streets was found to be flying about and be-
spattering people at a great distance. This, however, was
not the worst ; would that it had been ! It was but the begin-
ning of the horrors. Scarcely was the town of Burning-
shame aware of its deplorable condition when the Member of
Mr. Bull's family was discovered to be haunted, night and
day, by two evil spirits who had come down with him (they
being usually prowling about the lobbies and passages of
the house, and other dry places), and who, under the names
of an Attorney and a Parliamentary Agent, committed rav-
ages truly diabolical. The first act of this infernal pair was,
to throw open all the public-houses, and invite the people of
378 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Burningshame to drink themselves raving mad. They then
compelled them, with banners, and with instruments of brass,
and big drums, idiotically to parade the town, and fall foul
of all other banners, instruments of brass, and big drums,
that they met. In the meantime, they tortured and terrified
all the small tradesmen, buzzed in their ears, dazzled their
eyes, nipped their pockets, pinched their children, appeared
to and alarmed their wives (many of them in the family way),
broke the rest of whole families, and filled them with anxiety
and dread. Not content with this, they tempted the entire
town, got the people to sell their precious souls, put red-hot
money into their hands while they were looking another way,
made them forswear themselves, set father against son, brother
against brother, friend against friend; and made the whole
of Burningshame one sty of gluttony, drunkenness, avarice,
lying, false-swearing, waste, want, ill-will, contention and
depravity. In short, if the Member's visit had lasted very
long (which happily it did not) the place must have become
a hell upon earth for several generations. And all this, these
spirits did, with a wickedness peculiar to their accursed
state : perpetually howling that it was pure and glorious, that
it was free and independent, that it was Old England for ever,
and other scraps of malignant mockery.
Matters had arrived at this pitch, not only in Burning-
shame, but, as already observed, in an infinite variety of other
places, when Mr. Bull — having heard, perhaps, some rumours
of these disasters — recalled the various Members of his fam-
ily to his house in town. They were no sooner assembled,
than all the old noises broke out with redoubled violence ; the
same extraordinary confusion prevailed among the furni-
ture ; the cobweb and fungus thickened with greater fecundity
than before; and the multitude of spirits in the lobbies and
passages bellowed and yelled, and made a dismal noise — de-
scribed to be like the opening and shutting up of heavy cases
— for weeks together.
But even this was not the worst. Mr. Bull now found, on
questioning his family, that those evil spirits, the Attorneys
and the Parliamentary Agents, had obtained such strong pos-
session of many Members, that they (those members of Mr.
A HAUNTED HOUSE 379
Bull's family) stood in awe of the said spirits, and even
while they pretended to have been no parties to what the
spirits had done, constantly defended and sided with them,
and said among themselves that if they carried the spirits
over this bad job, the spirits would return the compliment by
and by. This discovery, as may readily be believed, occa-
sioned Mr. Bull the most poignant anguish, and he distract-
edly looked about him for any means of relieving his haunted
house of their dreadful presence. An implement called
a ballot box (much used by Mr. Bull for domestic purposes)
being recommended as efficacious, Mr. Bull suggested to his
family the expediency of trying it ; but, so many of the Mem-
bers roared out 'Un-English !' and were echoed in such fear-
ful tones, and with such great gnashing of teeth, by the
whole of the spirits in the passages and lobbies, that Mr.
Bull (who is in some things of a timid disposition) aban-
doned the idea for the time, without at all knowing what the
cry meant.
The house is still in the fearful condition described, and
the question with Mr. Bull is, What is to be done with it?
Instead of getting better it gets worse, if possible, every
night. Fevered by want of rest; confused by the perpetual
gush of words, and dragging of weights ; blinded by the toss-
ings from side to side ; bewildered by the clamour of the spir-
its ; and infected by the doings at Burningshame and else-
where; too many of the Members of Mr. Bull's family (as
Mr. Bull perceives with infinite regret) are beginning to con-
ceive that what is truth and honour out of Mr. Bull's house,
is not truth and honour in it. That within those haunted
precincts a gentleman may deem words all sufficient, and be-
come a miserable quibbler. That the whole world is com-
prised within the haunted house of Mr. Bull, and that there
is nothing outside to find him out, or call him to account.
But this, as Mr. Bull remarks, is a delusion of a haunted
mind; there being within his experience (which is pretty
large) a good deal outside — Mr. Bull thinks, quite enough
to pull his house about his family's ears, as soon as it ceases
to be respected.
This is the present state of the haunted house. Mr, Bull
380 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
has a fine Indian property, which has fallen into some con-
fusion, and requires good management and just stewardship;
but, as he says himself, how can he properly attend to his af-
fairs in such an uproar? His younger children stand in
great need of education, and must be sent to school some-
where ; but how can he clear his mind to balance the different
prospectuses of rival establishments in this perturbed con-
dition? Holy water has been tried — a pretty large supply
having been brought from Ireland — but it has not the least
effect, though it is spouted all over the floor, in profusion,
every night. 'Then,' says Mr. Bull, naturally much dis-
tressed in his mind, 'what am I to do, sir, with this house of
mine? I can't go on in this way. All about Burningshame
and those other places is well known. It won't do. I must
not allow the Members of my family to bring disease upon
the country on which they should bring health ; to load it
with disgrace instead of honour; with their dirty hands to
soil the national character on the most serious occasions when
they come in contact with it; and with their big talk to set
up one standard of morality for themselves and another for
the multitude. Nor must I be put off in this matter, for it
presses. Then what am I to do, sir, with this house of
mine ?'
GONE ASTRAY
[AUGUST 13, 1853]
WHEN I was a very small boy indeed, both in years and
stature, I got lost one day in the City of London. I was
taken out by Somebody (shade of Somebody forgive me for
remembering no more of thy identity!), as an immense treat,
to be shown the outside of Saint Giles's Church. I had ro-
mantic ideas in connection with that religious edifice ; firmly
believing that all the beggars who pretended through the
week to be blind, lame, one-armed, deaf and dumb, and other-
wise physically afflicted, laid aside their pretences every Sun-
day, dressed themselves in holiday clothes, and attended di-
GONE ASTRAY 381
vine service in the temple of their patron saint. I had a gen-
eral idea that the reigning successor of Bamfylde Moore
Carew acted as a sort of church-warden on these occasions,
and sat in a high pew with red curtains.
It was in the spring-time when these tender notions of
mine, bursting forth into new shoots under the influence of
the season, became sufficiently troublesome to my parents and
guardians to occasion Somebody to volunteer to take me to see
the outside of Saint Giles's Church, which was considered
likely (I suppose) to quench my romantic fire, and bring me
to a practical state. We set off after breakfast. I have an
impression that Somebody was got up in a striking manner —
in cord breecbes of fine texture and milky hue, in long jean
gaiters, in a green coat with bright buttons, in a blue necker-
chief, and a monstrous shirt-collar. I think he must have
newly come (as I had myself) out of the hop-grounds of
Kent. I considered him the glass of fashion and the mould
of form: a very Hamlet without the burden of his difficult
family affairs.
We were conversational together, and saw the outside of
Saint Giles's Church with sentiments of satisfaction, much
enhanced by a flag flying from the steeple. I infer that we
then went down to Northumberland House in the Strand to
view the celebrated lion over the gateway. At all events, I
know that in the act of looking up with mingled awe and ad-
miration at that famous animal I lost Somebody.
The child's unreasoning terror of being lost, comes as
freshly on me now as it did then. I verily believe that if I
had found myself astray at the North Pole instead of in the
narrow, crowded, inconvenient street over which the lion in
those days presided, I could not have been more horrified.
But, this first fright expended itself in a little crying and
tearing up and down; and then I walked, with a feeling of
dismal dignity upon me, into a court, and sat down on a step
to consider how to get through life.
To the best of my belief, the idea of asking my way home
never came into my head. It is possible that I may, for the
time, have preferred the dismal dignity of being lost; but I
have a serious conviction that in the wide scope of my ar-
382 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
rangements for the future, I had no eyes for the nearest and
most obvious course. I was but very juvenile; from eight
to nine years old, I fancy.
I had one and fourpence in my pocket, and a pewter ring
with a bit of red glass in it on my little finger. This jewel
had been presented to me by the object of my affections, on
my birthday, when we had sworn to marry, but had foreseen
family obstacles to our union, in her being (she was six years
old) of the Wesleyan persuasion, while I was devotedly at-
tached to the Church of England. The one and fourpence
were the remains of half-a-crown presented on the same an-
niversary by my godfather — a man who knew his duty and
did it.
Armed with these amulets, I made up my little mind to
seek my fortune. When I had found it, I thought I would
drive home in a coach and six, and claim my bride. I cried
a little more at the idea of such a triumph, but soon dried
my eyes and came out of the court to pursue my plans.
These were, first to go (as a species of investment) and see
the Giants in Guildhall, out of whom I felt it not improbable
that some prosperous adventure would arise; failing that
contingency, to try about the City for any opening of a
Whittington nature ; baffled in that too, to go into the army as
a drummer.
So, I began to ask my way to Guildhall: which I thought
meant, somehow, Gold or Golden Hall ; I was too knowing to
ask my way to the Giants, for I felt it would make people
laugh. I remember how immensely broad the streets seemed
now I was alone, how high the houses, how grand and mys-
terious everything. When I came to Temple Bar, it took
me half an hour to stare at it, and I left it unfinished even
then. I had read about heads being exposed on the top of
Temple Bar, and it seemed a wicked old place, albeit a noble
monument of architecture and a paragon of utility. When
at last I got away from it, behold I came, the next minute,
on the figures at St. Dunstan's ! Who could see those oblig-
ing monsters strike upon the bells and go? Between the
quarters there was the toyshop to look at — still there, at this
present writing, in a new form — and even when that en-
GONE ASTRAY 383
chanted spot was escaped from, after an hour and more, then
Saint Paul's arose, and how was I to get beyond its dome, or
to take my eyes from its cross of gold? I found it a long
journey to the Giants, and a slow one.
I came into their presence at last, and gazed up at them
with dread and veneration. They looked better-tempered,
and were altogether more shiny-faced, than I had expected;
but they were very big, and, as I judged their pedestals to
be about forty feet high, I considered that they would be
very big indeed if they were walking on the stone pavement.
I was in a state of mind as to these and all such figures, which
I suppose holds equally with most children. While I knew
them to be images made of something that was not flesh and
blood, I still invested them with attributes of life — with con-
sciousness of my being there, for example, and the power of
keeping a sly eye upon me. Being very tired I got into the
corner under Magog, to be out of the way of his eye, and fell
asleep.
When I started up after a long nap, I thought the giants
were roaring, but it was only the City. The place was just
the same as when I fell asleep: no beanstalk, no fairy, no
princess, no dragon, no opening in life of any kind. So,
being hungry, I thought I would buy something to eat, and
bring it in there and eat it, before going forth to seek my
fortune on the Whittington plan.
I was not ashamed of buying a penny roll in a baker's
shop, but I looked into a number of cooks' shops before I
could muster courage to go into one. At last I saw a pile of
cooked sausages in a window with the label, 'Small Germans,
A Penny.' Emboldened by knowing what to ask for, I went
in and said, 'If you please will you sell me a small German?'
which they did, and I took it, wrapped in paper in my pocket,
to Guildhall.
The giants were still lying by, in their sly way, pretend-
ing to take no notice, so I sat down in another corner, when
what should I see before me but a dog with his ears cocked.
He was a black dog, with a bit of white over one eye, and
bits of white and tan in his paws, and he wanted to play —
frisking about me, rubbing his nose against me, dodging at
384 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
me sideways, shaking his head and pretending to run away
backwards, and making himself good-naturedly ridiculous,
as if he had no consideration for himself, but wanted to raise
my spirits. Now, when I saw this dog I thought of Whit-
tington, and felt that things were coming right ; I encouraged
him by saying, 'Hi, boy !' 'Poor fellow !' 'Good dog !' and
was satisfied that he was to be my dog for ever afterwards,
and that he would help me to seek my fortune.
Very much comforted by this (I had cried a little at odd
times ever since I was lost), I took the small German out of
my pocket, and began my dinner by biting off a bit and
throwing it to the dog, who immediately swallowed it with a
one-sided jerk, like a pill. While I took a bit myself, and he
looked me in the face for a second piece, I considered by
what name I should call him. I thought Merrychance would
be an expressive name, under the circumstances ; and I was
elated, I recollect, by inventing such a good one, when Merry-
chance began to growl at me in a most ferocious manner.
I wondered he was not ashamed of himself, but he didn't
care for that ; on the contrary he growled a good deal more.
With his mouth watering, and his eyes glistening, and his
nose in a very damp state, and his head very much on one
side, he sidled about on the pavement in a threatening man-
ner and growled at me, until he suddenly made a snap at the
small German, tore it out of my hand, and went off with it.
He never came back to help me seek my fortune. From that
hour to the present, when I am forty years of age, I have
never seen my faithful Merrychance again.
I felt very lonely. Not so much for the loss of the small
German, though it was delicious (I knew nothing about
highly-peppered horse at that time), as on account of Merry-
chance's disappointing me so cruelly; for I had hoped he
would do every friendly thing but speak, and perhaps even
come to that. I cried a little more, and began to wish that
the object of my affections had been lost with me, for com-
pany's sake. But, then I remembered that she could not go
into the army as a drummer ; and I dried my eyes and ate my
loaf. Coming out, I met a milkwoman, of whom I bought a
pennyworth of milk ; quite set up again by my repast, I be-
GONE ASTRAY 385
gan to roam about the City, and to seek my fortune in the
Whittington direction.
When I go into the City, now, it makes me sorrowful to
think that I am quite an artful wretch. Strolling about it as
a lost child, I thought of the British Merchant and the Lord
Mayor, and was full of reverence. Strolling about it now,
I laugh at the sacred liveries of state, and get indignant with
the corporation as one of the strongest practical jokes of
the present day. What did I know then, about the multitude
who are always being disappointed in the City ; who are al-
ways expecting to meet a party there, and to receive money
there, and whose expectations are never fulfilled? What did
I know then, about that wonderful person, the friend in the
City, who is to do so many things for so many people ; who
is to get this one into a post at home, and that one into a
post abroad; who is to settle with this man's creditors, pro-
vide for that man's son, and see that other man paid ; who is
to 'throw himself into this grand Joint-Stock certainty, and
is to put his name down on that Life Assurance Directory,
and never does anything predicted of him? What did I
know, then, about him as the friend of gentlemen, Mosaic
Arabs and others, usually to be seen at races, and chiefly re-
siding in the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square ; and as being
unable to discount the whole amount of that paper in money,
but as happening to have by him a cask of remarkable fine
sherry, a dressing-case, and a Venus by Titian, with which he
would be willing to make up the balance? Had I ever heard
of him, in those innocent days, as confiding information
(which never by any chance turned out to be in the remotest
degree correct) to solemn bald men, who mysteriously im-
parted it to breathless dinner tables? No. Had I ever
learned to dread him as a shark, disregard him as a humbug,
and know him for a myth ? Not I. Had I ever heard of him
as associated with tightness in the money market, gloom in
consols, the exportation of gold, or that rock ahead in every-
body's course, the bushel of wheat? Never. Had I the
least idea what was meant by such terms as jobbery, rigging
the market, cooking accounts, getting up a dividend, making
things pleasant, and the like? Not the slightest. Should
386 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I have detected in Mr. Hudson himself, a staring carcase of
golden veal? By no manner of means. The City was to
me a vast emporium of precious stones and metals, casks
and bales, honour and generosity, foreign fruits and spices.
Every merchant and banker was a compound of Mr. Fitz-
Warren and Sinbad the Sailor. Smith, Payne, and Smith,
when the wind was fair for Barbary and the captain present,
were in the habit of calling their servants together (the cross
cook included) and asking them to produce their little ship-
ments. Glyn and Halifax had personally undergone great
hardships in the valley of diamonds. Baring Brothers had
seen Rocs' eggs and travelled with caravans. Rothschild
had sat in the Bazaar at Bagdad with rich stuffs for sale ; and
a veiled lady from the Sultan's harem, riding on a donkey, had
fallen in love with him.
Thus I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream,
staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty
faith in the marvellousness of everything. Up courts and
down courts — in and out of yards and little squares — peeping
into counting-house passages and running away — poorly
feeding the echoes in the court of the South Sea House with
my timid steps — roaming down into Austin Friars, and won-
dering how the Friars used to like it — ever staring at the
British merchants, and never tired of the shops — I rambled
on, all through the day. In such stories as I made, to ac-
count for the different places, I believed as devoutly as in the
City itself. I particularly remember that when I found my-
self on 'Change, and saw the shabby people sitting under the
placards about ships, I settled that they were Misers, who
had embarked all their wealth to go and buy gold-dust or
something of that sort, and were waiting for their respective
captains to come and tell them that they were ready to set
sail. I observed that they all munched dry biscuits, and I
thought it was to keep of sea-sickness.
This was very delightful; but it still produced no result
according to the Whittington precedent. There was a din-
ner preparing at the Mansion House, and when I peeped in
at a grated kitchen window, and saw the men cooks at work
in their white caps, my heart began to beat with hope that the
GONE ASTRAY 387
Lord Mayor, or the Lady Mayoress, or one of the young
Princesses their daughters, would look out of an upper apart-
ment and direct me to be taken in. But, nothing of the kind
occurred. It was not until I had been peeping in some time
that one of the cooks called to me (the window was open) 'Cut
away, you sir!' which frightened me so, on account of his
black whiskers, that I instantly obeyed.
After that, I came to the India House, and asked a boy
what it was, who made faces and pulled my hair before he
told me, and behaved altogether in an ungenteel and dis-
courteous manner. Sir James Hogg himself might have
been satisfied with the veneration in which I held the India
House. I had no doubt of its being the most wonderful, the
most magnanimous, the most incorruptible, the most prac-
tically disinterested, the most in all respects astonishing,
establishment on the face of the earth. I understood the
nature of an oath, and would have sworn it to be one entire
and perfect chrysolite.
Thinking much about boys who went to India, and who
immediately, without being sick, smoked pipes like curled-up
bell-ropes, terminating in a large cut-glass sugar basin up-
side down, I got among the outfitting shops. There, I read
the lists of things that were necessary for an India-going
boy, and when I came to 'one brace of pistols,' thought what
happiness to be reserved for such a fate ! Still no British
merchant seemed at all disposed to take me into his house.
The only exception was a chimney-sweep — he looked at me
as if he thought me suitable to his business ; but I ran away
from him.
I suffered very much, all day, from boys; they chased me
down turnings, brought me to bay in doorways, and treated
me quite savagely, though I am sure I gave them no offence.
One boy, who had a stump of black-lead pencil in his pocket,
wrote his mother's name and address (as he said) on my
white hat, outside the crown. MRS. BLORES, WOODEN LEG
WALK, TOBACCO-STOPPER Row, WAPPING. And I couldn't
rub it out.
I recollect resting in a little churchyard after this persecu-
tion, disposed to think upon the whole, that if I and the
388 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
object of my affections could be buried there together, at
once, it would be comfortable. But, another nap, and a pump,
and a bun, and above all a picture that I saw, brought me
round again.
I must have strayed by that time, as I recall my course,
into Goodman's Fields, or somewhere thereabouts. The pic-
ture represented a scene in a play then performing at a
theatre in that neighbourhood which is no longer in existence.
It stimulated me to go to that theatre and see that play. I
resolved, as there seemed to be nothing doing in the Whitting-
ton way, that on the conclusion of the entertainments I would
ask my way to the barracks, knock at the gate, and tell
them that I understood they were in want of drummers, and
there I was. I think I must have been told, but I know I
believed, that a soldier was always on duty, day and night,
behind every barrack-gate, with a shilling; and that a boy
who could by any means be prevailed on to accept it,
instantly became a drummer, unless his father paid four
hundred pounds.
I found out the theatre — of its external appearance I only
remember the loyal initials G. R. untidily painted in yellow
ochre on the front — and waited, with a pretty large crowd
for the opening of the gallery doors. The greater part of
the sailors and others composing the crowd, were of the low-
est description, and their conversation was not improving ;
but I understood little or nothing of what was bad in it then,
and it had no depraving influence on me. I have wondered
since, how long it would take, by means of such association,
to corrupt a child nurtured as I had been, and innocent as I
was.
Whenever I saw that my appearance attracted attention,
either outside the doors or afterwards within the theatre, I
pretended to look out for somebody who was taking care of
me, and from whom I was separated, and to exchange nods
and smiles with that creature of my imagination. This
answered very well. I had my sixpence clutched in my hand
ready to pay; and when the doors opened, with a clattering
of bolts, and some screaming from women in the crowd, I
went on with the current like a straw. My sixpence was
GONE ASTKAY 889
rapidly swallowed up in the money-taker's pigeon-hole,
which looked to me like a sort of mouth, and I got into the
freer staircase above and ran on (as everybody else did) to
get a good place. When I came to the back of the gallery,
there were very few people in it, and the seats looked so hor-
ribly steep, and so like a diving arrangement to send me, head-
foremost, into the pit, that I held by one of them in a terrible
fright. However, there was a good-natured baker with a
young woman, who gave me his hand, and we all three scram-
bled over the seats together down into the corner of the
first row. The baker was very fond of the young woman,
and kissed her a good deal in the course of the evening.
I was no sooner comfortably settled, than a weight fell
upon my mind, which tormented it most dreadfully, and
which I must explain. It was a benefit night — the benefit of
the comic actor— a little fat man with a very large face
and, as I thought then, the smallest and most diverting hat
that ever was seen. This comedian, for the gratification of
his friends and patrons, had undertaken to sing a comic
song on a donkey's back, and afterwards to give away the
donkey so distinguished, by lottery. In this lottery, every
person admitted to the pit and gallery had a chance. On
paying my sixpence, I had received the number, forty-seven ;
and I now thought, in a perspiration of terror, what should
I ever do if that number was to come up the prize, and I was
to win the donkey!
It made me tremble all over to think of the possibility
of my good fortune. I knew I never could conceal the fact
of my holding forty-seven, in case that number came up, be-
cause, not to speak of my confusion, which would immediately
condemn me, I had shewn my number to the baker. Then, I
pictured to myself the being called upon to come down on
the stage and receive the donkey. I thought how all the
people would shriek when they saw it had fallen to a little
fellow like me. How should I lead him out — for of course
he wouldn't go ? If he began to bray, what should I do? If
he kicked, what would become of me? Suppose he backed
into the stage-door, and stuck there, with me upon him? For
I felt that if I won him, the comic actor would have me on
390 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
his back, the moment he could touch me. Then if I got him
out of the theatre, what was I to do with him? How was I
to feed him? Where was I to stable him? It was bad
enough to have gone astray by myself, but to go astray
with a donkey, too, was a calamity more tremendous than I
could bear to contemplate.
These apprehensions took away all my pleasure in the first
piece. When the ship came on — a real man-of-war she was
called in the bills — and rolled prodigiously in a very heavy
sea, I couldn't, even in the terrors of the storm, forget the
donkey. It was awful to see the sailors pitching about, with
telescopes and speaking trumpets (they looked very tall in-
deed aboard the man-of-war), and it was awful to suspect
the pilot of treachery, though impossible to avoid it, for
when he cried — 'We are lost ! To the raft, to the raft ! A
thunderbolt has struck the main-mast!' — I myself saw him
take the main-mast out of its socket and drop it overboard ;
but even these impressive circumstances paled before my
dread of the donkey. Even, when the good sailor (and he
was very good) came to good fortune, and the bad sailor
(and he was very bad) threw himself into the ocean from
the summit of a curious rock, presenting something of the
appearance of a pair of steps, I saw the dreadful donkey
through my tears.
At last the time came when the fiddlers struck up the comic
song, and the dreadful animal, with new shoes on, as I
inferred from the noise they made, came clattering in with
the comic actor on his back. He was dressed out with rib-
bons (I mean the donkey was) and as he persisted in turn-
ing his tail to the audience, the comedian got off him, turned
about, and sitting with his face that way, sang the song
three times, amid thunders of applause. All this time, I was
fearfully agitated; and when two pale people, a good deal
splashed with the mud of the streets, were invited out of the
pit to superintend the drawing of the lottery, and were re-
ceived with a round of laughter from everybody else, I could
have begged and prayed them to have mercy on me, and
not draw number forty-seven.
But, I was soon put out of my pain now, for a gentleman
GONE ASTRAY 391
behind me, in a flannel jacket and a yellow neck-kerchief,
who had eaten two fried soles and all his pockets-full of
nuts before the storm began to rage, answered to the winning
number, and went down to take possession of the prize. This
gentleman had appeared to know the donkey, rather, from the
moment of his entrance, and had taken a great interest in
his proceedings ; driving him to himself, if I use an intel-
ligible phrase, and saying, almost in my ear, when he made
any mistake, 'Kum up, you precious Moke. Kum up!' He
was thrown by the donkey on first mounting him, to the great
delight of the audience (including myself), but rode him off
with great skill afterwards, and soon returned to his seat
quite calm. Calmed myself by the immense relief I had sus-
tained, I enjoyed the rest of the performance very much
indeed. I remember there were a good many dances, some in
fetters and some in roses, and one by a most divine little
creature, who made the object of my affections look but com-
mon-place. In the concluding drama, she re-appeared as a
boy (in arms, mostly), and was fought for, several times. I
rather think a Baron wanted to drown her, and was on various
occasions prevented by the comedian, a ghost, a Newfound-
land dog, and a church bell. I only remember beyond this,
that I wondered where the Baron expected to go to, and that
he went there in a shower of sparks. The lights were turned
out while the sparks died out, and it appeared to me as if the
whole play — ship, donkey, men and women, divine little
creature, and all — were a wonderful firework that had gone
off, and left nothing but dust and darkness behind it.
It was late when I got out into the streets, and there was
no moon, and there were no stars, and the rain fell heavily.
When I emerged from the dispersing crowd, the ghost and
the baron had an ugly look in my remembrance ; I felt
unspeakably forlorn; and now, for the first time, my little
bed and the dear familiar faces came before me, and touched
my heart. By daylight, I had never thought of the grief at
home. I had never thought of my mother. I had never
thought of anything but adapting myself to the circum-
stances in which I found myself, and going to seek my for-
tune.
392 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
For a boy who could do nothing but cry, and run about,
saying, 'O I am lost !' to think of going into the army was,
I felt sensible, out of the question. I abandoned the idea of
asking my way to the barracks — or rather the idea abandoned
me — and ran about, until I found a watchman in his box. It
is amazing to me, now, that he should have been sober; but
I am inclined to think he was too feeble to get drunk.
This venerable man took me to the nearest watch-house;
—I say he took me, but in fact I took him, for when I think
of us in the rain, I recollect that we must have made a com-
position, like a vignette of Infancy leading Age. He had
a dreadful cough, and was obliged to lean against a wall,
whenever it came on. We got at last to the watch-house, a
warm and drowsy sort of place embellished with great-coats
and rattles hanging up. When a paralytic messenger had
been sent to make inquiries about me, I fell asleep by the
fire, and awoke no more until my eyes opened on my father's
face. This is literally and exactly how I went astray. They
used to say I was an odd child, and I suppose I was. I am
an odd man perhaps.
Shade of Somebody, forgive me for the disquiet I must
have caused thee ! When I stand beneath the Lion, even now,
I see thee rushing up and down, refusing to be comforted.
I have gone astray since, many times, and farther afield.
May I therein have given less disquiet to others, than herein
I gave to thee !
FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES
[OCTOBER 1, 1853]
WE may assume that we are not singular in entertaining a
very great tenderness for the fairy literature of our child-
hood. What enchanted us then, and is captivating a million
of young fancies now, has, at the same blessed time of life,
enchanted vast hosts of men and women who have done their
long day's work, and laid their grey heads down to rest. It
would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy
393
that has made its way among us through these slight chan-
nels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and
aged, kind treatment of animals, the love of nature, abhor-
rence of tyranny and brute force — many such good things
have been first nourished in the child's heart by this powerful
aid. It has greatly helped to keep us, in some sense, ever
young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender
track not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with
children, sharing their delights.
In an utilitarian ager of all other times, it is a matter of
grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected. Our
English red tape is too magnificently red ever to be employed
in the t}Ting up of such trifles, but every one who has con-
sidered the subject knows full well that a nation without
fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never
will, hold a great place under the sun. The theatre, having
done its worst to destroy these admirable fictions — and hav-
ing in a most exemplary manner destroyed itself, its artists,
and its audiences, in that perversion of its duty — it becomes
doubly important that the little books themselves, nurseries
of fancy as they are* should be preserved. To preserve
them in their usefulness, they must be as much preserved in
their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if
they were actual fact. Whosoever alters them to suit his
own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking,
of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what
does not belong to him.
We have lately observed, with pain, the intrusion of a
Whole Hog of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower
garden. The rooting of the animal among the roses would in
itself have awakened in us nothing but indignation ; our pain
arises from his being violently driven in by a man of genius,
our own beloved friend, Mr. George Cruikshank. That in-
comparable artist is, of all men, the last who should lay
his exquisite hand on fairy text. In his own art he under-
stands it so perfectly, and illustrates it so beautifully, so
humorously, so wisely, that he should never lay down his
etching needle to 'edit' the Ogre, to whom with that little
instrument he can render such extraordinary justice. But,
394 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
to 'editing' Ogres, and Hop-o'-my-thumbs, and their families,
our dear moralist has in a rash moment taken, as a means of
propagating the doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition
of the sale of spirituous liquors, Free Trade, and Popular
Education. For the introduction of these topics, he has
altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to
do any such thing we protest with all our might and main.
Of his likewise altering it to advertise that excellent series of
plates, 'The Bottle,' we say nothing more than that we foresee
a new and improved edition of Goody Two Shoes, edited by
E. Moses and Son ; of the Dervish with the box of ointment,
edited by Professor Holloway ; and of Jack and the Bean-
stalk, edited by Mary Wedlake, the popular authoress of
Do you bruise your oats yet.
Now, it makes not the least difference to our objection
whether we agree or disagree with our worthy friend, Mr.
Cruikshank, in the opinions he interpolates upon an old fairy
story. Whether good or bad in themselves, they are, in that
relation, like the famous definition of a weed; a thing grow-
ing up in a wrong place. He has no greater moral justifica-
tion in altering the harmless little books than we should have
in altering his best etchings. If such a precedent were fol-
lowed we must soon become disgusted with the old stories
into which modern personages so obtruded themselves, and the
stories themselves must soon be lost. With seven Blue
Beards in the field, each coming at a gallop from his • own
platform mounted on a foaming hobby, a generation or two
hence would not know which was which, and the great original
Blue Beard would be confounded with the counterfeits.
Imagine a Total abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe,
with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the
gunpowder left out, and the rum left in. Imagine a
Vegetarian edition, with the goat's flesh left out. Imagine
a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that 'tarnal
old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines
Protection Society edition, to deny the cannibalism and make
Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed.
Robinson Crusoe would be 'edited' out of his island in a hun-
FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES 395
dred years, and the island would be swallowed up in the
editorial ocean.
Among the other learned professions we have now the Plat-
form profession, chiefly exercised by a new and meritorious
class of commercial travellers who go about to take the sense
of meetings on various articles: some, of a very superior
description: some, not quite so good. Let us write the
story of Cinderella, 'edited' by one of these gentlemen, doing
a good stroke of business, and having a rather extensive
mission.
ONCE upon a time, a rich man and his wife were the par-
ents of a lovely daughter. She was a beautiful child, and be-
came, at her own desire, a member of the Juvenile Bands of
Hope when she was only four years of age. When this
child was only nine years of age her mother died, and all the
Juvenile Bands of Hope in her district — the Central district,
number five hundred and twenty-seven — formed in a proces-
sion of two and two, amounting to fifteen hundred, and
followed her to the grave, singing chorus Number forty-two,
'O come,' etc. This grave was outside the town, and under
the direction of the Local Board of Health, which reported at
certain stated intervals to the General Board of Health,
Whitehall.
The motherless little girl was very sorrowful for the loss
of her mother, and so was her father, too, at first ; but, after
a year was over, he married again — a very cross widow lady,
with two proud tyrannical daughters as cross as herself. He
was aware that he could have made his marriage with this
lady a civil process by simply making a declaration before a
Registrar; but he was averse to this course on religious
grounds, and, being a member of the Montgolfian persuasion,
was married according to the ceremonies of that respectable
church by the Reverend Jared Jocks, who improved the
occasion.
He did not live long with his disagreeable wife. Having
been shamefully accustomed to shave with warm water instead
of cold, which he ought to have used (see Medical Appendix
B. and C.)» his undermined constitution could not bear up
against her temper, and he soon died. Then, this orphan was
cruelly treated by her step-mother and the two daughters,
and was forced to do the dirtiest of the kitchen work; to
scour the saucepans, wash the dishes, and light the fires —
which did not consume their own smoke, but emitted a dark
vapour prejudicial to the bronchial tubes. The only warm
place in the house where she was free from ill-treatment was
the kitchen chimney-corner; and as she used to sit down
there, among the cinders, when her work was done, the proud
fine sisters gave her the name of Cinderella.
About this time, the King of the land, who never made
war against anybody, and allowed everybody to make war
against him — which was the reason why his subjects were the
greatest manufacturers on earth, and always lived in security
and peace — gave a great feast, which was to last two days.
This splendid banquet was to consist entirely of artichokes
and gruel and from among those who were invited to it, and
to hear the delightful speeches after dinner, the King's son
was to choose a bride for himself. The proud fine sisters
were invited, but nobody knew anything about poor Cin-
derella, and she was to stay at home.
She was so sweet-tempered, however, that she assisted the
haughty creatures to dress, and bestowed her admirable taste
upon them as freely as if they had been kind to her.
Neither did she laugh when they broke seventeen stay-laces
in dressing; for, although she wore no stays herself, being
sufficiently acquainted with the anatomy of the human figure
to be aware of the destructive effects of tight-lacing, she
always reserved her opinions on that subject for the Regen-
erative Record (price three halfpence in a neat wrapper),
which all good people take in, and to which she was a Con-
tributor.
At length the wished-for moment arrived, and the proud fine
sisters swept away to the feast and speeches, leaving Cin-
derella in the chimney-corner. But, she could always occupy
her mind with the general question of the Ocean Penny Post-
age, and she had in her pocket an unread Oration on that sub-
ject, made by the well-known Orator, Nehemiah Nicks. She
FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES 397
was lost in the fervid eloquence of that talented Apostle
when she became aware of the presence of one of those female
relatives which (it may not be generally known) it is not
lawful for a man to marry. I allude to her grandmother.
'Why so solitary, my child?' said the old lady to Cin-
derella.
'Alas, grandmother,' returned the poor girl, 'my sisters
have gone to the feast and speeches, and here sit I in the
ashes, Cinderella 1'
'Never,' cried the old lady with animation, 'shall one of the
Band of Hope despair ! Run into the garden, my dear, and
fetch me an American Pumpkin! American, because in
some parts of that independent country, there are prohibitory
laws against the sale of alcoholic drinks in any form. Also;
because America produced (among many great pumpkins)
the glory of her sex, Mrs. Colonel Bloomer. None but an
American Pumpkin will do, my child.'
Cinderella ran into the garden, and brought the largest
American Pumpkin she could find. This virtuously demo-
cratic vegetable her grandmother immediately changed into a
splendid coach. Then, she sent her for six mice from the
mouse-trap, which she changed into prancing horses, free
from the obnoxious and oppressive post-horse duty. Then,
to the rat-trap in the stable for a rat, which she changed to
a state-coachman, not amenable to the iniquitous assessed
taxes. Then, to look behind a watering-pot for six lizards,
which she changed into six footmen, each with a petition in
his hand ready to present to the Prince, signed by fifty
thousand persons, in favour of the early closing movement.
'But grandmother,' said Cinderella, stopping in the midst
of her delight, and looking at her clothes, 'how can I go to
the palace in these miserable rags?'
'Be not uneasy about that, my dear,' returned her grand-
mother.
Upon which the old lady touched her with her wand, her
rags disappeared, and she was beautifully dressed. Not in
the present costume of the female sex, which has been proved
to be at once grossly immodest and absurdly inconvenient,
but in rich sky-blue satin pantaloons gathered at the ankle,
398 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
a puce-coloured satin pelisse sprinkled with silver flowers, and
a very broad Leghorn hat. The hat was chastely orna-
mented with a rainbow-coloured ribbon hanging in two bell-
pulls down the back; the pantaloons were ornamented with
a golden stripe ; and the effect of the whole was unspeakably
sensible, feminine, and retiring. Lastly, the old lady put on
Cinderella's feet a pair of shoes made of glass: observing
that but for the abolition of the duty on that article, it
never could have been devoted to such a purpose ; the effect
of all such taxes being to cramp invention, and embarrass
the producer, to the manifest injury of the consumer.
When the old lady had made these wise remarks, she dismissed
Cinderella to the feast and speeches, charging her by no
means to remain after twelve o'clock at night.
The arrival of Cinderella at the Monster Gathering pro-
duced a great excitement. As a delegate from the United
States had just moved that the King do take the chair, and
as the motion had been seconded and carried unanimously,
the King himself could not go forth to receive her. But
His Royal Highness the Prince (who was to move the second
resolution), went to the door to hand her from the carriage.
This virtuous Prince, being completely covered from head to
foot with Total Abstinence Medals, shone as if he were
attired in complete armour; while the inspiring strains of
the Peace Brass Band in the gallery (composed of the Lamb-
kin Family, eighteen in number, who cannot be too much
encouraged) awakened additional enthusiasm.
The King's son handed Cinderella to one of the reserved
seats for pink tickets, on the platform, and fell in love with
her immediately. His appetite deserted him; he scarcely
tasted his artichokes, and merely trifled with his gruel.
When the speeches began, and Cinderella, wrapped in the
eloquence of the two inspired delegates who occupied the
entire evening in speaking to the first Resolution, occasionally
cried, 'Hear, hear!' the sweetness of her voice completed her
conquest of the Prince's heart. But, indeed the whole male
portion of the assembly loved her — and doubtless would have
done so, even if she had been less beautiful, in consequence of
FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES 399
the contrast which her dress presented to the bold and ridicu-
lous garments of the other ladies.
At a quarter before twelve the second inspired delegate
having drunk all the water in the decanter, and fainted away,
the King put the question, 'That this meeting do now ad-
journ until to-morrow.' Those who were of that opinion
holding up their hands, and then those who were of the con-
trary, theirs, there appeared an immense majority in favour
of the resolution, which was consequently carried. Cinder-
ella got home in safety, and heard nothing all that night,
or all next day, but the praises of the unknown lady with
the sky-blue satin pantaloons.
When the time for the feast and speeches came round
again, the cross stepmother and the proud fine daughters
went out in good time to secure their places. As soon as
they were gone, Cinderella's grandmother returned and
changed her as before. Amid a blast of welcome from the
Lambkin family, she was again handed to the pink seat on
the platform by His Royal Highness.
This gifted Prince was a powerful speaker, and had the
evening before him. He rose at precisely ten minutes before
eight, and was greeted with tumultuous cheers and waving of
handkerchiefs. When the excitement had in some degree
subsided, he proceeded to address the meeting: who were
never tired of listening to speeches, as no good people ever
are. He held them enthralled for four hours and a quarter.
Cinderella forgot the time, and hurried away so when she
heard the first stroke of twelve, that her beautiful dress
changed back to her old rags at the door, and she left one of
her glass shoes behind. The Prince took it up, and vowed —
that is, made a declaration before a magistrate; for he
objected on principle to the multiplying of oaths — that he
would only marry the charming creature to whom that shoe
belonged.
He accordingly caused an advertisement to that effect to
be inserted in all the newspapers ; for, the advertisement duty,
an impost most unjust in principle and most unfair in opera-
tion, did not exist in that country ; neither was the stamp on
iOO MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
newspapers known in that land — which had as many news-
papers as the United States, and got as much good out of
them. Innumerable ladies answered the advertisement and
pretended that the shoe was theirs; but, every one of them
was unable to get her foot into it. The proud fine sisters
answered it, and tried their feet with no greater success.
Then, Cinderella, who had answered it too, came forward
amidst their scornful jeers, and the shoe slipped on in a
moment. It is a remarkable tribute to the improved and
sensible fashion of the dress her grandmother had given her,
that if she had not worn it the Prince would probably never
have seen her feet.
The marriage was solemnised with great rejoicing.
When the honeymoon was over, the King retired from public
life, and was succeeded by the Prince. Cinderella, being now
a queen, applied herself to the government of the country on
enlightened, liberal, and free principles. All the people who
ate anything she did not eat, or who drank anything she did
not drink, were imprisoned for life. All the newspaper offices
from which any doctrine proceeded that was not her doctrine,
were burnt down. All the public speakers proved to demon-
stration that if there were any individual on the face of the
earth who differed from them in anything, that individual was
a designing ruffian and an abandoned monster. She also
threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to pub-
lic offices, and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex;
who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public
life and whom nobody dared to love. And they all lived hap-
pily ever afterwards.
Frauds on the Fairies once permitted, we see little reason
why they may not come to this, and great reason why they
may. The Vicar of Wakefield was wisest when he was tired
of being always wise. The world is too much with us,
early and late. Leave this precious old escape from it, alone.
THINGS THAT CANNOT BE DONE 401
THINGS THAT CANNOT BE DONE
[OCTOBER 8, 1853]
NOTHING flagrantly wrong can be done, without adequate
punishment, under the English law. What a comfortable
truth that is ! I have always admired the English law with
all my heart, as being plain, cheap, comprehensive, easy, un-
mistakable, strong to help the right doer, weak to help the
wrong doer, entirely free from adherence to barbarous usages
which the world has passed, and knows to be ridiculous and
unjust. It is delightful never to see the law at fault, never
to find it in what our American relatives call a fix, never to
behold a scoundrel able to shield himself with it, always to
contemplate the improving spectacle of Law in its wig and
gown leading blind Justice by the hand and keeping her in
the straight broad course.
I am particularly struck, at the present time, by the
majesty with which the Law protects its own humble adminis-
trators. Next to the punishment of any offence by fining the
offender in a sum of money — which is a practice of the Law,
too enlightened and too obviously just and wise, to need any
commendation — the penalties inflicted on an intolerable brute
who maims a police officer for life, make my soul expand with
a solemn joy. I constantly read in the newspapers of such
an offender being committed to prison with hard labour, for
one, two, or even three months. Side by side with such a
case, I read the statement of a surgeon to the police force,
that within such a specified short time, so many men have
been under his care for similar injuries; so many of whom
have recovered, after undergoing a refinement of pain ex-
pressly contemplated by their assailants in the nature of their
attack ; so many of whom, being permanently debilitated and
incapacitated, have been dismissed the force. Then, I know
that a wild beast in a man's form cannot gratify his savage
hatred of those who check him in the perpetration of crime,
without suffering a thousand times more than the object of
his wrath, and without being made a certain and a stern
402 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
example. And this is one of the occasions on which the
beauty of the Law of England fills me with the solemn joy I
have mentioned.
The paeans I have of late been singing within myself on
the subject of the determination of the Law to prevent by
severe punishment the oppression and ill-treatment of
Women, have been echoed in the public journals. It is true
that an ill-conditioned friend of mine, possessing the remark-
ably inappropriate name of Common Sense, is not fully satis-
fied on this head. It is true that he says to me, 'Will you
look at these cases of brutality, and tell me whether you con-
sider six years of the hardest prison task-work (instead of
six months) punishment enough for such enormous cruelty?
Will you read the increasing records of these violences from
day to day, as more and more sufferers are gradually encour-
aged by a law of six months' standing to disclose their long
endurance, and will you consider what a legal system that
must be which only now applies an imperfect remedy to such
a giant evil? Will you think of the torments and murders
of a dark perspective of past years, and ask yourself the
question whether in exulting so mightily, at this time of day,
over a law faintly asserting the lowest first principle of all
law, you are not somewhat sarcastic on the virtuous Statutes
at Large, piled up there on innumerable shelves?' It is true,
I say, that my ill-conditioned friend does twit me, and the
law I dote on, after this manner; but it is enough for me
to know, that for a man to maim and kill his wife by inches —
or even the woman, wife or no wife, who shares his home —
without most surely incurring a punishment, the justice of
which satisfies the mind and heart of the common level of
humanity, is one of the things that cannot be done.
But, deliberately, falsely, defamingly, publicly and perse-
veringly, to pursue and outrage any woman is foremost
among the things that cannot be done. Of course, it cannot
be done. This is the year one thousand eight hundred and
fifty-three ; and Steam and Electricity would indeed have left
the limping Law behind, if it could be done in the present
age.
Let me put an impossible case, to illustrate at once my
THINGS THAT CANNOT BE DONE 403
admiration of the Law, and its tender care for Women.
This may be an appropriate time for doing so, when most of
us are complimenting the Law on its avenging gallantry.
Suppose a young lady to be left a great heiress, under
circumstances which cause the general attention to be at-
tracted to her name. Suppose her to be modest, retiring,
otherwise only known for her virtues, charities, and noble
actions. Suppose an abandoned sharper, so debased, so
wanting in the manhood of a commonly vile swindler, so lost
to every sense of shame and disgrace, as to conceive the
original idea of hunting this young lady through life until
she buys him off with money. Suppose him to adjust the
speculation deliberately with himself. 'I know nothing of
her, I never saw her ; but I am a bankrupt, with no character
and no trade that brings me in any money; and I mean to
make the pursuit of her, my trade. She seeks retirement; I
will drag her out of it. She avoids notoriety ; I will force it
upon her. She is rich ; she shall stand and deliver. I am
poor; I will have plunder. The opinion of society. What
is that to me? I know the Law, and the Law will be my
friend — not hers.'
It is very difficult, I know, to suppose such a set of circum-
stances, or to imagine such an animal not caged behind iron
bars or knocked on the head. But, let us stretch elastic
fancy to such an extreme point of supposition. He goes to
work at the trade he has taken up, and works at it, industri-
ously, say for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years. He invents
the most preposterous and transparent lies, which not one
human being whose ears they ever reach, can possibly believe.
He pretends that the lady promised to marry him — say, in a
nonsensical jingle of rhymes which he produces, and which
he says and swears (for what will he not say and swear,
except the truth?) is the production of the lady's hand. Be-
fore incapable country justices, and dim little farthing rush-
lights of the law, he drags this lady at his pleasure, whenever
he will. He makes the Law a screw to force the hand she
has had the courage to close upon her purse from the begin-
ning. He makes the Law a rack on which to torture her
constancy, her affections, her consideration for the living,
404 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and her veneration for the dead. He shakes the letter of
the Law over the heads of the puny tribunals he selects for
his infamous purpose, and frightens them into an endurance
of his audacious mendacity. Because the Law is a Law of
the peddling letter and not of the comprehensive spirit, this
magistrate shall privately bribe him with money to conde-
scend to overlook his omission (sanctioned by the practice of
years) of some miserable form as to the exact spot in which
he puts his magisterial signature upon a document ; and that
commissioner shall publicly compliment him upon his ex-
traordinary acquirements, when it is manifest upon the face of
the written evidence before the same learned commissioner's
eyes in court, that he cannot so much as spell. But he
knows the Law. And the letter of the Law is with the rascal
and not with the rascal's prey.
For, we are to suppose that all through these years, he is
never punished with any punishment worthy of the name, for
his real offence. He is now and then held to bail, gets out of
prison, and goes to his trade again. He commits wilful and
corrupt perjury, down a byeway, and is lightly punished for
that ; but he takes his brazen face along the high road of his
guilt, uncrushed. The blundering, babbling, botched Law,
in splitting hairs with him, makes business for itself ; they get
on very well together — worthy companions — shepherds both.
Now, I am willing to admit that if such a case as this, could
by any possibility be ; if it could go on so long and so pub-
licly, as that the whole town should have the facts within its
intimate knowledge; if it were as well known as the Queen's
name; if it never presented itself afresh, in any court, without
awakening an honest indignation in the breasts of all the audi-
ence not learned in the Law ; and yet if this nefarious culprit
were just as free to drive his trade at last as he was at first,
and the object of his ingenious speculation could find
absolutely no redress ; then, and in that case, I say, I am will-
ing to admit that the Law would be a false pretence and a
self-convicted failure. But, happily, and as we all know, this
is one of the things that cannot be done.
No. Supposing such a culprit face to face with it, the
Law would address him thus. 'Stand up, knave, and hear
THINGS THAT CANNOT BE DONE 405
me! I am not the thing of shreds and patches you suppose.
I am not the degraded creature whom any wretch may invoke
to gratify his basest appetites and do his dirtiest work. Not
for that, am I part and parcel of a costly system maintained
with cheerfulness out of the labours of a great free people.
Not for that, do I continually glorify my Bench and my Bar,
and, from my high place, look complacently upon a sea of
wigs. I am not a jumble and jargon of words, fellow ; I am
a Principle. I was set up here, by those who can pull me
down — and will, if I be incapable — to punish the wrong-doer,
for the sake of the body-politic in whose name I act, and from
whom alone my power is derived. I know you, well, for a
wrong-doer ; I have it in proof before me that you are a
forsworn, crafty, defiant, bullying, pestilent impostor. And
if I be not an impostor too, and a worse one, my plainest
duty is to set my heel upon you — which I mean to do before
you go hence.
'Attend to me 3-et, knave. Hold your peace ! You are
one of those landsharks whose eyes have twinkled to see the
driving of coaches and six through Acts of Parliament, and
who come up with their dirty little dog's meat carts to follow
through the same crooked ways. But you shall know, that I
am something more than a maze of tortuous ins and outs, and
that I have at least, one plain road — to wit, the road by
which, for the general protection, and in the exercise of
my first function, I mean to send you into safe keeping ; fifty
thousand Acts, and a hundred thousand Caps, and five hun-
dred Sees, notwithstanding.
'For, Beast of Prey, above the perplexed letter of all Law
that has any might in it, goes the spirit. If I be, as I claim
to be, the child of Justice, and not the offspring of the Artful
Dodger, that spirit shall, before I gabble through one legal
argument more, provide for you and all the like of you, as
you deserve. If it cannot do that of itself, I will have letter
to help it. But I will not remain here, a spectacle and a
scandal to those who are the breath of my nostrils, with your
dirty hands clinging to my robe, your brazen lungs misrepre-
senting me, your shameless face beslavering me in my prosti-
tution.'
406 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Thus the Law clearly would address any such impossible
person. For this reason, among others not dissimilar, I glory
in the Law, and am ready at all times to shed my best blood
to uphold it. For this reason too, I am proud, as an Eng-
lishman, to know that such a design upon a woman as I have,
in a wild moment, imagined, is not to be entered upon, and is
— as it ought to be — one of the things that can never be
done.
FIRE AND SNOW
[JANUARY 21, 1854]
CAN this be the region of cinders and coal-dust, which we
have traversed before now, divers times, both by night and by
day, when the dirty wind rattled as it came against us charged
with fine particles of coal, and the natural colour of the earth
and all its vegetation might have been black, for anything
our eyes could see to the contrary in a waste of many miles?
Indeed it is the same country, though so altered that on this
present day when the old year is near its last, the North-East
wind blows white, and all the ground is white — pure white —
insomuch that if our lives depended on our identifying a
mound of ashes as we jar along this Birmingham and Wol-
verhampton Railway, we could not find a handful.
The sun shines brightly, though it is a cold cold sun, this
piercing day ; and when the Birmingham tunnel disgorges us
into the frosty air, we find the pointsman housed in no mere
box, but in a resplendent pavilion, all bejewelled with daz-
zling icicles, the least a yard long. A radiant pointsman he
should be, we think, invested by fairies with a dress of rain-
bow hues, and going round and round in some gorgeously
playful manner on a gold and silver pivot. But, he has
changed neither his stout great-coat, nor his stiff hat, nor his
stiff attitude of watch; and as (like the ghostly dagger of
Macbeth) he marshalls us the way that we were going, we
observe him to be a mortal with a red face — red, in part
from a seasonable joviality of spirit, and in part from frost
FIRE AND SNOW 407
and wind — with the encrusted snow dropping silently off his
outstretched arm.
Redder than ever are the very red-brick little houses out-
side Birmingham — all staring at the railway in the snowy
weather, like plethoric old men with white heads. Clean linen
drying in yards seems ill-washed, against the intense white of
the landscape. Far and near, the tall tall chimneys look out
over one another's shoulders for the swart ashes familiar to
them, and can discern nothing but snow. Is this the smoke of
other chimneys setting in so heavily from the north-east, and
overclouding the short brightness of the day? No. By the
North Pole it is more snow.
Making directly at us, and flying almost horizontally be-
fore the wind, it rushes against the train, in a dark blast pro-
fusely speckled as it were with drifting white feathers. A
sharp collision, though a harmless one ! No wonder that the
engine seems to have a fearful cold in his head. No wonder,
with a deal of out-door work in such a winter, that he is very
hoarse and very short of breath, very much blown when we
come to the next station, and very much given to weeping,
snorting and spitting, all the time he stops !
Which is short enough, for these little upstairs stations at
the tops of high arches, whence we almost look down the
chimneys of scattered workshops, and quite inhale their smoke
as it comes puffing at us — these little upstairs stations rarely
seem to do much business anywhere, and just now are like
suicidal heights to dive from into depths of snow. So, away
again over the moor, where the clanking serpents usually
writhing above coal-pits, are dormant and whitened over- —
this being holiday time — but where those grave monsters, the
blast-furnaces, which cannot stoop to recreation, are awake
and roaring. Now, a smoky village ; now, a chimney ; now,
a dormant serpent who seems to have been benumbed in the act
of working his way for shelter into the lonely little engine-
house by the pit's mouth ; now, a pond with black specks slid-
ing and skating ; now, a drift with similar specks half sunken
in it throwing snowballs; now, a cold white altar of snow
with fire blazing on it; now, a dreary open space of mound
and fell, snowed smoothly over, and closed in at last by sullen
408 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
cities of chimneys. Not altogether agreeable to think of
crossing such space without a guide, and being swallowed by
a long-abandoned, long-forgotten shaft. Not even agreeable,
in this undermined country, to think of half a dozen railway
arches with the train upon them, suddenly vanishing through
the snow into the excavated depths of a coal-forest.
Snow, wind, ice, and Wolverhampton— all together. No
carriage at the station, everything snowed up. So much the
better. The Swan will take us under its warm wing, walking
or riding. Where is the Swan's nest? In the market-place.
So much the better yet, for it is market-day, and there will
be something to see from the Swan's nest.
Up the streets of Wolverhampton, where the doctor's bright
door-plate is dimmed as if Old Winter's breath were on it, and
the lawyer's office window is appropriately misty, to the mar-
ket-place: where we find a cheerful bustle and plenty of
people — for the most part pretending not to like the snow,
but liking it very much, as people generally do. The Swan
is a bird of a good substantial brood, worthy to be a country
cousin of the hospitable Hen and Chickens, whose company
we have deserted for only a few hours and with whom we shall
roost again at Birmingham to-night. The Swan has bounti-
ful coal-country notions of firing, snug homely rooms, cheer-
ful windows looking down upon the clusters of snowy
umbrellas in the market-place, and on the chaffering and
chattering which is pleasantly hushed by the thick white down
lying so deep, and softly falling still. Neat bright-eyed wait-
resses do the honours of the Swan. The Swan is confident
about its soup, is troubled with no distrust concerning cod-
fish, speaks the word of promise in relation to an enormous
chine of roast beef, one of the dishes at 'the Ironmasters' din-
ner,' which will be disengaged at four. The Ironmasters'
dinner! It has an imposing sound. We think of the Iron-
masters joking, drinking to their Ironmistresses, clinking their
glasses with a metallic ring, and comporting themselves at the
festive board with the might of men who have mastered Iron.
Now for a walk! Not in the direction of the furnaces,
which we will see to-night when darkness shall set off the fires ;
but in the country with our faces towards Wales. Say, ye
FIRE AND SNOW 409
hoary finger-posts whereon the name of picturesque old
Shrewsbury is written in characters of frost ; ye hedges lately
bare, that have burst into snowy foliage ; ye glittering trees
from which the wind blows sparkling dust ; ye high drifts by
the roadside, which are blue a-top, where ye are seen op-
posed to the bright red and yellow of the horizon ; say all
of ye, is summer the only season for enjoyable walks! An-
swer, roguish crow, alighting on a sheep's back to pluck his
wool off for an extra blanket, and skimming away, so black,
over the white field; give us your opinion, swinging ale-
house signs, and cosey little bars ; speak out, farrier's shed
with faces all a-glow, fountain of sparks, heaving bellows,
and ringing music; tell us, cottage hearths and sprigs of
holly in cottage windows ; be eloquent in praise of wintry
walks, you sudden blasts of wind that pass like shiverings of
Nature, you deep roads, you solid fragments of old hayricks
with your fragrance frozen in ! Even you, drivers of toiling
carts, coal-laden, keeping company together behind your
charges, dog-attended, and basket-bearing : even you, though
it is no easy work to stop, every now and then, and chip the
snow away from all the clogged wheels with picks, will have
a fair word to say for winter, will you not !
Down to the solitary factory in the dip of the road, de-
serted of holiday-makers, and where the water-mill is frozen
up— then turn. As we draw nigh to our bright bird again,
the early evening is closing in, the cold increases, the snow
deadens and darkens, and lights spring up in the shops. A
wet walk, ankle deep in snow the whole way. We must buy
some stockings, and borrow the Swan's slippers before dinner.
It is a mercy that we step into the toy-shop to buy a pocket-
comb too, or the pretty child-customer (as it seems to us, the
only other customer the elderly lady of the toy-shop has lately
had), might have stood divided between the two puzzles at
one shilling each, until the putting up of the shutters. But,
the incursion of our fiery faces and snowy dresses, coupled
with our own individual recommendation of the puzzle on the
right hand, happily turn the scale. The best of pocket-
combs for a shilling, and now for the stockings. Dibbs
'don't keep 'em,' though he writes up that he does, and Jibbs
410 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
is so beleaguered by country people making market-day and
Christmas-week purchases, that his shop is choked to the
pavement. Mibbs is the man for our money, and Mibbs keeps
everything in the stocking line, though he may not exactly
know where to find it. However, he finds what we want, in
an inaccessible place, after going up ladders for it like a
lamplighter; and a very good article it is, and a very civil
worthy trader Mibbs is, and may Mibbs increase and multi-
ply ! Likewise young Mibbs, unacquainted with the price
of anything in stock, and young Mibbs's aunt who attends
to the ladies' department.
The Swan is rich in slippers — in those good old flip-flap
inn slippers which nobody can keep on, which knock double
knocks on every stair as their wearer comes downstairs, and
fly away over the banisters before they have brought him to
level ground. Rich also is the Swan in wholesome well-cooked
dinner, and in tender chine of beef, so brave in size that the
mining of all the powerful Ironmasters is but a sufficient
outlet for its gravy. Rich in things wholesome and sound and
unpretending is the Swan, except that we would recommend
the good bird not to dip its beak into its sherry. Under
the change from snow and wind to hot soup, drawn red cur-
tains, fire and candle, we observe our demonstrations at first
to be very like the engine's at the little station; but they
subside, arid we dine vigorously — another tribute to a winter
walk! — and finding that the Swan's ideas of something hot
to drink are just and laudable, we adopt the same, with
emendations (in the matter of lemon chiefly) of which modesty
and total abstinence principles forbid the record. Then,
thinking drowsily and delightfully of all things that have
occurred to us during the last four-and-twenty hours, and of
most things that have occurred to us during the last four-
and-twenty years, we sit in arm chairs, amiably basking be-
fore the fire — playthings for infancy — creatures to be asked
a favour of — until aroused by the fragrance of hot tea and
muffins. These we have ordered, principally as a perfume.
The bill of the Swan is to be commended as not out of pro-
portion to its plumage; and now, our walking shoes being
dried and baked, we must get them on somehow — for the
FIRE AND SNOW 411
rosy driver with his carriage and pair who is to take us among
the fires on the blasted heath by Bilston announces from under
a few shawls, and the collars of three or four coats that we
must be going. Away we go, obedient to the summons, and,
having taken leave of the lady in the Swan's bar opposite
the door, who is almost rustled out of her glass case and
blown upstairs whenever the door opens, we are presently in
outer darkness grinding the snow.
Soon the fires begin to appear. In all this ashy country,
there is still not a cinder visible; in all this land of smoke,
not a stain upon the universal white. A very novel and
curious sight is presented by the hundreds of great fires
blazing in the midst of the cold dead snow. They illuminate
it very little. Sometimes, the construction of a furnace,
kiln, or chimney, admits of a tinge being thrown upon the
pale ground near it; but, generally the fire burns in its own
sullen ferocity, and the snow lies impassive and untouched.
There is a glare in the sky, flickering now and then over the
greater furnaces, but the earth lies stiff in its winding sheet,
and the huge corpse candles burning above it affect it no
more than colossal tapers of state move dead humanity.
Sacrificial altars, varying in size, but all gigantic, and all
made of ice and snow, abound. Tongues of flame shoot up
from them, and pillars of fire turn and twist upon them.
Fortresses on fire, a whole town in a blaze, Moscow newly
kindled, we see fifty times ; rattling and crashing noises strike
the ear, and the wind is loud. Thus, crushing the snow with
our wheels, and sidling over hillocks of it, and sinking into
drifts of it, we roll on softly through a forest of confla-
gration ; the rosy-faced driver, concerned for the honour of
his locality, much regretting that many fires are making
holiday to-night, and that we see so few.
Come we at last to the precipitous wooden steps by which
we are to be mast-headed at a railway station. Good night
to rosy-face, the cheeriest man we know, and up. Station
very gritty, as a general characteristic. Station very dark,
the gas being frozen. Station very cold, as any timber
cabin suspended in the air with such a wind making lunges at
it, would be. Station very dreary, being a station. Man and
412 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
boy behind money-taking partition, checking accounts, and
not able to unravel a knot of seven-and-sixpence. Small boy,
with a large packet on his back, like Christian with his bundle
of sins, sent down into the snow an indefinite depth and dis-
tance, with instructions to 'look sharp in delivering that, and
then cut away back here for another.' Second small boy in
search of basket for Mr. Brown, unable to believe that it is
not there, and that anybody can have dared to disappoint
Brown. Six third-class passengers prowling about, and try-
ing in the dim light of one oil lamp to read with interest the
dismal time-bills and notices about throwing stones at trains,
upon the walls. Two more, scorching themselves at the rusty
stove. Shivering porter going in and out, bell in hand, to
look for the train, which is overdue, finally gives it up for
the present, and puts down the bell — also the spirits of the
passengers. In our own innocence we repeatedly mistake the
roaring of the nearest furnace for the approach of the train,
run out, and return covered with ignominy. Train in sight
at last — but the other train — which don't stop here— and it
seems to tear the trembling station limb from limb, as it
rushes through. Finally, some half an hour behind its time
through the tussle it has had with the snow, comes our ex-
pected engine, shrieking with indignation and grief. And
as we pull the clean white coverlet over us in bed at Birming-
ham, we think of the whiteness lying on the broad landscape
all around for many a frosty windy mile, and find that it
wakes bed very comfortable.
ON STRIKE
[FEBRUARY 11, 1854]
TRAVELLING down to Preston a week from this date, I chanced
to sit opposite to a very acute, very determined, very emphatic
personage, with a stout railway rug so drawn over his chest
that he looked as if he were sitting up in bed with his great-
coat, hat, and gloves on, severely contemplating your humble
servant from behind a large blue and grey checked counter-
ON STRIKE 418
pane. In calling him emphatic, I do not mean that he was
warm ; he was coldly and bitingly emphatic as a frosty
wind is.
'You are going through to Preston, sir?' says he, as soon
as we were clear of the Primrose Hill tunnel.
The receipt of this question was like the receipt of a jerk
of the nose ; he was so short and sharp.
'Yes.'
'This Preston strike is a nice piece of business !' said the
gentleman. 'A pretty piece of business !'
'It is very much to be deplored,' said I, 'on all accounts.'
'They want to be ground. That's what they want, to bring
'em to their senses,' said the gentleman ; whom I had already
began to call in my own mind Mr. Snapper, and whom I may
as well call by that name here as by any other.
I deferentially enquired, who wanted to be ground?
'The hands,' said Mr. Snapper. 'The hands on strike, and
the hands who help 'em.'
I remarked that if that was all they wanted, they must be
a very unreasonable people, for surely they had had a little
grinding, one way and another, already. Mr. Snapper eyed
me with sternness, and after opening and shutting his
leathern-gloved hands several times outside his counterpane^
asked me abruptly, 'Was I a delegate?'
I set Mr. Snapper right on that point, and told him I was
no delegate.
'I am glad to hear it,' said Mr. Snapper. 'But a friend to
the Strike, I believe?'
'Not at all,' said I .
'A friend to the Lock-out?' pursued Mr. Snapper.
'Not in the least,' said I.
Mr. Snapper's rising opinion of me fell again, and he gave
me to understand that a man must either be a friend to the
' Masters or a friend to the Hands.
'He may be a friend to both,' said I.
Mr. Snapper didn't see that; there was no medium in the
Political Economy of the subject. I retorted on Mr. Snap-
per, that Political Economy was a great and useful science
in its own way and its own place; but that I did not trans-
414 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
plant my definition of it from the Common Prayer Book, and
make it a great king above all gods. Mr. Snapper tucked
himself up as if to keep me off, folded his arms on top of
his counterpane, leaned back, and looked out of window.
'Pray what would you have, sir,' enquired Mr. Snapper,
suddenly withdrawing his eyes from the prospect to me, 'in
the relations between Capital and Labour, but Political Econ-
omy ?'
I always avoid the stereotyped terms in these discussions
as much as I can, for I have observed, in my little way, that
they often supply the place of sense and moderation. I
therefore took my gentleman up with the words employers
and employed, in preference to Capital and Labour.
'I believe,' said I, 'that into the relations between employers
and employed, as into all the relations of this life, there must
enter something of feeling and sentiment ; something of mu-
tual explanation, forbearance, and consideration ; something
which is not to be found in Mr. McCulloch's dictionary,
and is not exactly stateable in figures ; otherwise those rela-
tions are wrong and rotten at the core and will never bear
sound fruit.'
Mr. Snapper laughed at me. As I thought I had just
as good reason to laugh at Mr. Snapper, I did so, and we
were both contented.
'Ah!' said Mr. Snapper, patting his counterpane with a
hard touch. 'You know very little of the improvident and
unreasoning habits of the common people, 7 see.'
'Yet I know something of those people, too,' was my re-
ply. 'In fact, Mr. ,' I had no nearly called him Snap-
per ! 'in fact, sir, I doubt the existence at this present time of
many faults that are merely class faults. In the main, I am
disposed to think that whatever faults you may find to exist,
in your own neighbourhood for instance, among the hands,
you will find tolerably equal in amount among the masters'
also, and even among the classes above the masters. They
will be modified by circumstances, and they will be the less
excusable among the better-educated, but they will be pretty
fairly distributed. I have a strong expectation that we shall
live to see the conventional adjectives now apparently insep-
ON STRIKE 415
arable from the phrases working people and lower orders,
gradually fall into complete disuse for this reason.'
'Well, but we began with strikes,' Mr. Snapper observed
impatiently. 'The masters have never had any share in
strikes.'
'Yet I have heard of strikes once upon a time in that same
county of Lancashire,' said I, 'which were not disagreeable
to some masters when they wanted a pretext for raising
prices.'
'Do you mean to say those masters had any hand in getting
up those strikes?' asked Mr. Snapper.
'You will perhaps obtain better information among per-
sons engaged in some Manchester branch trades, who have
good memories,' said I.
Mr. Snapper had no doubt, after this, that I thought the
hands had a right to combine?
'Surely,' said I. 'A perfect right to combine in any lawful
manner. The fact of their being able to combine and ac-
customed to combine may, I can easily conceive, be a protec-
tion to them. The blame even of this business is not all on
one side. I think the associated Lock-out was a grave
error. And when you Preston masters — '
'/ am not a Preston master,' interrupted Mr. Snapper.
'When the respectable combined body of Preston masters,'
said I, 'in the beginning of this unhappy difference, laid
down the principle that no man should be employed hence-
forth who belonged to any combination — such as their own —
they attempted to carry with a high hand a partial and unfair
impossibility, and were obliged to abandon it. This was
an unwise proceeding, and the first defeat.'
Mr. Snapper had known, all along, that I was no friend
to the masters.
'Pardon me,' said I, 'I am unfeignedly a friend to the
masters, and have many friends among them.'
'Yet you tbink these hands in the right?' quoth Mr. Snap-
per.
'By no means,' said I ; 'I fear they are at present engaged
in an unreasonable struggle, wherein they began ill and
cannot end well.'
416 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Mr. Snapper, evidently regarding me as neither fish, flesh,
nor fowl, begged to know after a pause if he might enquire
whether I was going to Preston on business?
Indeed I was going there, in my unbusinesslike manner, I
confessed, to look at the strike.
'To look at the strike !' echoed Mr. Snapper, fixing his hat
on firmly with both hands. 'To look at it! Might I ask
you now, with what object you are going to look at it?'
'Certainly,' said I, 'I read, even in liberal pages, the hardest
Political Economy — of an extraordinary description too
sometimes, and certainly not to be found in the books — -as
the only touchstone of this strike. I see, this very day, in
a to-morrow's liberal paper, some astonishing novelties in the
politico-economical way, showing how profits and wages have
no connexion whatever ; coupled with such references to these
hands as might be made by a very irascible General to rebels
and brigands in arms. Now, if it be the case that some of
the highest virtues of the working people still shine through
them brighter than ever in their conduct of this mistake of
theirs, perhaps the fact may reasonably suggest to me— and
to others besides me — that there is some little thing wanting
in the relations between them and their employers, which
neither political economy nor Drum-head proclamation writ-
ing will altogether supply, and which we cannot too soon or
too temperately unite in trying to find out.'
Mr. Snapper, after again opening and shutting his gloved
hands several times, drew the counterpane higher over hia
chest, and went to bed in disgust. He got up at Rugby,
took himself and counterpane into another carriage, and left
me to pursue my journey alone.
When I got to Preston, it was four o'clock in the afternoon.
The day being Saturday and market-day, a foreigner might
have expected, from among so many idle and not over-fed
people as the town contained, to find a turbulent, ill-condi-
tioned crowd in the streets. But, except for the cold smoke-
less factory chimnies, the placards at the street corners, and
the groups of working people attentively reading them, nor
foreigner nor Englishman could have had the least suspicion
that there existed any interruption to the usual labours of the
ON STRIKE 417
place. The placards thus perused were not remarkable for
their logic certainly, and did not make the case particularly
clear; but, considering that they emanated from, and were
addressed to, people who had been out of employment for
three-and-twenty consecutive weeks, at least they had little
passion in them, though they had not much reason. Take
the worst I could find:
TRIENDS AND FELLOW OPERATIVES,
'Accept the grateful thanks of twenty thousand struggling
Operatives, for the help you have showered upon Preston since
the present contest commenced.
'Your kindness and generosity, your patience and long-con-
tinued support deserve every praise, and are only equalled by
the heroic and determined perseverance of the outraged and in-
sulted factory workers of Preston, who have been struggling for
some months, and are, at this inclement season of the year,
bravely battling for the rights of themselves and the whole toil-
ing community.
'For many years before the strike took place at Preston, the
Operatives were the down trodden and insulted serfs of their
Employers, who in times of good trade and general prosperity,
wrung from their labour a California of gold, which is now being
used to crush those who created it, still lower and lower in the
scale of civilisation. This has been the result of our commercial
prosperity ! — more wealth for the rich and more poverty for the
Poor! Because the workpeople of Preston protested against
this state of things, — -because they combined in a fair and legiti-
mate way for the purpose of getting a reasonable share of the
reward of their own labour, the fair dealing Employers of Pres-
ton, to their eternal shame and disgrace, locked up their Mills,
and at once fell swoop deprived, as they thought, from twenty to
thirty thousand human beings of the means of existence. Cruelty
and tyranny always defeat their own object; it was so in this
case, and to the honour and credit of the working classes of this
country, we have to record, that, those whom the rich and wealthy
sought to destroy, the poor and industrious have protected from
harm. This love of justice and hatred of wrong, is a noble
feature in the character and disposition of the working man, and
gives us hope that in the future, this world will become what
its great architect intended, not a place of sorrow, toil, oppres-
sion and wrong, but the dwelling place and the abode of peace,
418 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
plenty, happiness and love, where avarice and all the evil pas-
sions engendered by the present system of fraud and injustice
shall not have a place.
'The earth was not made for the misery of its people ; intellect
was not given to man to make himself and fellow creatures un-
happy. No, the fruitfulness of the soil and the wonderful in-
ventions— the result of mind — all proclaim that these things
were bestowed upon us for our happiness and well-being, and
not for the misery and degradation of the human race.
'It may serve the manufacturers and all who run away with
the lion's share of labour's produce, to say that the impartial
God intended that there should be a partial distribution of his
blessings. But we know that it is against nature to believe, that
those who plant and reap all the grain, should not have enough
to make a mess of porridge; and we know that those who weave
all the cloth should not want a yard to cover their persons, whilst
those who never wove an inch have more calico, silks and satins,
than would serve the reasonable wants of a dozen working men
and their families.
'This system of giving everything to the few, and nothing to
the many, has lasted long enough, and we call upon the working
people of this country to be determined to establish a new and
improved system — a system that shall give to all who labour, a
fair share of those blessings and comforts which their toil pro-
duce; in short, we wish to see that divine precept enforced,
which says, "Those who will not work, shall not eat."
'The task is before you, working men; if you think the good
which would result from its accomplishment, is worth struggling
for, set to work and cease not, until you have obtained the good
time coming, not only for the Preston Operatives, but for your-
selves as well.
'By Order of the Committee.
•MURPHY'S TEMPERANCE HOTEL, CHAPEL WALKS,
'PBESTON, January 2±th, 1854.'
It is a melancholy thing that it should not occur to the
Committee to consider what would become of themselves, their
friends, and fellow operatives, if those calicoes, silks, and
satins, were not worn in very large quantities ; but I shall not
enter into that question. As I had told my friend Snapper,
what I wanted to see with my own eyes, was, how these people
acted under a mistaken impression, and what qualities they
ON STRIKE 419
showed, even at that disadvantage, which ought to be the
strength and peace — not the weakness and trouble — of the
community. I found, even from this literature, however,
that all masters were not indiscriminately unpopular. Wit-
ness the following verses from the New Song of the Preston
Strike :
'There's Henry Hornby, of Blackburn, he is a jolly brick,
He fits the Preston masters nobly, and is very bad to trick;
He pays his hands a good price, and I hope he will never sever,
So we'll sing success to Hornby and Blackburn for ever.
'There is another gentleman, I 'm sure you '11 all lament,
In Blackburn for him they 're raising a monument,
You know his name, 'tis of great fame, it was late Eccles of honour,
May Hopwood, and Sparrow, and Hornby live for ever.
'So now it is time to finish and end my rhyme,
We warn these Preston Cotton Lords to mind for future time.
With peace and order too I hope we shall be clever,
We sing success to Stockport and Blackburn for ever.
'Now, lads, give your minds to it.'
The balance sheet of the receipts and expenditures for the
twenty-third week of the strike was extensively posted. The
income for that week was two thousand one hundred and
forty pounds odd. Some of the contributors were poet-
ical. As,
'Love to all and peace to the dead,
May the poor now in need never want bread —
three-and-sixpence.' The following poetical remonstrance
was appended to the list of contributions from the Gorton
district :
'Within these walls the lasses fair
Refuse to contribute their share,
Careless of duty — blind to fame,
For shame, ye lasses, oh ! for shame !
Come, pay up, lasses, think what 's right,
Defend your trade with all your might;
For if you don't the world will blame.
And cry, ye lasses, oh, for shame!
Let 's hope in future all will pay,
That Preston folks may shortly say —
That by your aid they have obtain'd
The greatesf victory erer gained.'
420 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Some of the subscribers veiled their names under encour-
aging sentiments, as Not tired yet, All in a mind, Win the
day, Fraternity, and the like. Some took jocose appellations,
as A stunning friend, Two to one Preston wins, Nibbling
Joe, and The Donkey Driver. Some expressed themselves
through their trades, as Cobbler Dick, sixpence, The tailor
true, sixpence, Shoemaker, a shilling, The chirping black-
smith, sixpence, and A few of Maskery's most feeling coach-
makers, three and threepence. An old balance sheet for the
fourteenth week of the Strike was headed with this quotation
from Mr. Carlyle, 'Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man ;
but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hun-
dred that will stand adversity.' The Elton district prefaced
its report with these lines :
'Oh ! ye who start a noble scheme,
For general good designed;
Ye workers in a cause that tends
To benefit your kind:
Mark out the path ye fain would tread,
The game ye mean to play;
And if it be an honest one,
Keep steadfast in your way!
'Although you may not gain at once
The points ye most desire;
Be patient — time can wonders work;
Plod on, and do not tire:
Obstructions, too, may crowd your path,
In threatening, stern array;
Yet flinch not ! fear not ! they may prove
Mere shadows in your way.
Then, while there's work for you to do,
Stand not despairing by,
Let "forward" be the move ye make,
Let "onward" be your cry;
And when success has crowned your plans,
Twill all your pains repay.
To see the good your labour's done-
Then droop not on your way.'
In this list, 'Bear ye one another's burthens,' sent one
Pound fifteen. 'We '11 stand to our text, see that ye love one
another,' sent nineteen shillings. 'Christopher Hardman's
men again, they say they can always spare one shilling out
ON STRIKE 421
of ten,' sent two-and-sixpence. The following masked threats
were the worst feature in any bill I saw : —
'If that fiddler at Uncle Tom's Cabin blowing room does not
pay, Punch will set his legs straight.
'If that drawer at card side and those two slubbers do not pay,
Punch will say something about their bustles.
'If that winder at last shift does not pay next week, Punch will
tell about her actions.'
But, on looking at this bill again, I found that it came from
Bury and related to Bury, and had nothing to do with
Preston. The Masters' placards were not torn down or dis-
figured, but were being read quite as attentively as those on
the opposite side.
That evening, the Delegates from the surrounding districts
were coming in, according to custom, with their subscription
lists for the week just closed. These delegates meet on Sun-
day as their only day of leisure ; when they have made their
reports, they go back to their homes and their Monday's work.
On Sunday morning, I repaired to the Delegates' meeting.
These assemblages take place in a cockpit, which, in the
better times of our fallen land, belonged to the late Lord
Derby for the purposes of the intellectual recreation implied
in its name. I was directed to the cockpit up a narrow lane,
tolerably crowded by the lower sort of working people. Per-
sonally, I was quite unknown in the town, but every one
made way for me to pass, with great civility, and perfect
good humour. Arrived at the cockpit door, and expressing
my desire to see and hear, I was handed through the crowd,
down into the pit, and up again, until I found myself seated
on the topmost circular bench, within one of the secretary's
table, and within three of the chairman. Behind the chair-
man was a great crown on the top of a pole, made of parti-
coloured calico, and strongly suggestive of May-day. There
was no other symbol or ornament in the place.
It was hotter than any mill or factory I have ever been in ;
but there was a stove down in the sanded pit, and delegates
were seated close to it, and one particular delegate often
warmed his hands at it, as if he were chilly. The air was
422 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
so intensely close and hot, that at first I had but a confused
perception of the delegates down in the pit, and the dense
crowd of eagerly listening men and women (but not very
many of the latter) filling all the benches and choking such
narrow standing-room as there was. When the atmosphere
cleared a little on better acquaintance, I found the question
under discussion to be, Whether the Manchester Delegates in
attendance from the Labour Parliament, should be heard?
If the Assembly, in respect of quietness and order, were
put in comparison with the House of Commons, the Right
Honourable the Speaker himself would decide for Preston.
The chairman was a Preston weaver, two or three and fifty
years of age, perhaps ; a man with a capacious head, rather
long dark hair growing at the sides and back, a placid at-
tentive face, keen eyes, a particularly composed manner, a
quiet voice, and a persuasive action of his right arm. Now
look 'ee heer my friends. See what t' question is. T' ques-
tion is, sholl these heer men be heerd. Then 't cooms to
this, what ha' these men got t' tell us? Do they bring
mooney? If they bring mooney, fords t' expenses o' this
strike, they 're welcome. For, Brass, my friends, is what we
want, and what we must ha' (hear hear hear!). Do they
coom to us wi' any suggestion for the conduct of this strike?
If they do, they 're welcome. Let 'em give us their advice
and we will hearken to 't. But, if these men coom heer, to
tell us what t' Labour Parliament is, or what Ernest Jones's
opinions is, or t' bring in politics and differences amoong
us when what we want is 'armony, brotherly love, and con-
cord ; then I say t' you, decide for yoursel' carefully, whether
these men ote to be heerd in this place. (Hear hear hear!
and No no no !) Chairman sits down, earnestly regarding
delegates, and holding both arms of his chair. Looks ex-
tremely sensible ; his plain coarse working man's shirt collar
easily turned down over his loose Belcher neckerchief. Dele-
gate who has moved that Manchester delegates be heard,
presses motion — Mr. Chairman, will that delegate tell us, as
a man, that these men have anything to say concerning this
present strike and lock-out, for we have a deal of business
to do, and what concerns this present strike and lock-out is
OX STRIKE 423
our business and nothing else is. (Hear hear hear!) — Dele-
gate in question will not compromise the fact ; these men
want to defend the Labour Parliament from certain charges
made against them. — Very well, Mr. Chairman, Then I move
as an amendment that you do not hear these men now, and
that you proceed wi' business — and if you don't I '11 look
after you, I tell you that. (Cheers and laughter) — Coom
lads, prov 't then ! — Two or three hands for the delegates ; all
the rest for the business. Motion lost, amendment carried,
Manchester deputation not to be heard.
But now, starts up the delegate from Throstletown, in a
dreadful state of mind. Mr. Chairman, I hold in my hand
a bill ; a bill that requires and demands explanation from you,
sir ; an off ensive bill ; a bill posted in my town of Throstle-
town without my knowledge, without the knowledge of my
fellow delegates who are here beside me ; a bill purporting to
be posted by the authority of the massed committee, sir, and
of which my fellow delegates and myself were kept in ig-
norance. Why are we to fye slighted? Why are we to be
insulted? Why are we to be meanly stabbed in the dark?
Why is this assassin-like course of conduct to be pursued to-
wards us? Why is Throstletown, which has nobly assisted
you, the operatives of Preston, in this great struggle, and
which has brought its contributions up to the full sevenpence
a loom, to be thus degraded, thus aspersed, thus traduced, thus
despised, thus outraged in its feelings by un-English and un-
manly conduct? Sir, I hand you up that bill, and I require of
you, sir, to give me a satisfactory explanation of that bill.
And I have that confidence in your known integrity, sir, as to
be sure that you will give it, and that you will tell us who is
to blame, and that you will make reparation to Throstletown
for this scandalous treatment. Then, in hot blood, up starts
Gruff shaw (professional speaker) who is somehow responsible
for this bill. O my friends, but explanation is required here !
O my friends, but it is fit and right that you should have
the dark ways of the real traducers and apostates, and the
real un-English stabbers, laid bare before you. My friends
when this dark conspiracy first began — But here the per-
suasive right hand of the chairman falls gently on Gruffshaw's
424 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
shoulder. Gruffshaw stops in full boil. My friends, these
are hard words of my friend Gruffshaw, and this is not the
business — No more it is, and once again, sir, I, the delegate
who said I would look after you, do move that you proceed
to business. — Preston has not the strong relish for personal
altercation that Westminster hath. Motion seconded and
carried, business passed to, Gruffshaw dumb.
Perhaps the world could not afford a more remarkable con-
trast than between the deliberate collected manner of these
men proceeding with their business, and the clash and hurry
of the engines among which their lives are passed. Their
astonishing fortitude and perseverance ; their high sense of
honour among themselves ; the extent to which they are im-
pressed with the responsibility that is upon them of setting a
careful example, and keeping their order out of any harm
and loss of reputation; the noble readiness in them to help
one another, of which most medical practitioners and working
clergymen can give so many affecting examples ; could scarcely
ever be plainer to an ordinary observer of human nature than
in this cockpit. To hold, for a minute, that the great mass
of them were not sincerely actuated by the belief that all
these qualities were bound up in what they were doing, and
that they were doing right, seemed to me little short of an
impossibility. As the different delegates (some in the very
dress in which they had left the mill last night) reported the
amounts sent from the various places they represented, this
strong faith on their parts seemed expressed in every tone
and every look that was capable of expressing it. One man
was raised to enthusiasm by his pride in bringing so much;
another man was ashamed and depressed because he brought
so little ; this man triumphantly made it known that he could
give you, from the store in hand, a hundred pounds in addi-
tion next week, if you should want it ; and that man pleaded
that he hoped his district would do better before long; but I
could as soon have doubted the existence of the walls that en-
closed us, as the earnestness with which they spoke (many of
them referring to the children who were to be born to labour
after them) of 'this great, this noble, gallant, godlike strug-
gle.' Some designing and turbulent spirits among them, no
ON STRIKE 425
doubt there are ; but I left the place with a profound convic-
tion that their mistake is generally an honest one, and that it
is sustained by the good that is in them, and not by the evil.
Neither by night nor by day was there any interruption to
the peace of the streets. Nor was this an accidental state of
things, for the police records of the town are eloquent to the
same effect. I traversed the streets very much, and was, as a
stranger, the subject of a little curiosity among the idlers;
but I met with no rudeness or ill-temper. More than once,
when I was looking at the printed balance-sheets to which I
have referred, and could not quite comprehend the setting
forth of the figures, a bystander of the working class inter-
posed with his explanatory forefinger and helped me
out. Although the pressure in the cockpit on Sunday
was excessive, and the heat of the room obliged me
to make my way out as I best could before the close
of the proceedings, none of the people whom I put to
inconvenience showed the least impatience; all helped me,
and all cheerfully acknowledged my word of apology as I
passed. It is very probable, notwithstanding, that they may
have supposed from my being there at all — I and my compan-
ion were the only persons present, not of their own order —
that I was there to carry what I heard and saw to the opposite
side ; indeed one speaker seemed to intimate as much.
On the Monday at noon, I returned to this cockpit, to see
the people paid. It was then about half filled, principally
with girls and women. They were all seated, waiting, with
nothing to occupy their attention; and were just in that state
when the unexpected appearance of a stranger differently
dressed from themselves, and with his own individual peculiari-
ties of course, might, without offence, have had something
droll in it even to more polite assemblies. But I stood there,
looking on, as free from remark as if I had come to be paid
with the rest. In the place which the secretary had occupied
yesterday, stood a dirty little common table, covered with five-
penny piles of halfpence. Before the paying began, I won-
dered who was going to receive these very small sums; but
when it did begin, the m37stery was soon cleared up. Each of
"these piles was the change for sixpence, deducting a penny.
426 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
All who were paid, in filing round the building to prevent con-
fusion, had to pass this table on the way out; and the greater
part of the unmarried girls stopped here, to change, each a
sixpence, and subscribe her weekly penny in aid of the people
on strike who had families. A very large majority of these
girls and women were comfortably dressed in all respects, clean,
wholesome and pleasant-looking. There was a prevalent neat-
ness and cheerfulness, and an almost ludicrous absence of any-
thing like sullen discontent.
Exactly the same appearances were observable on the same
day, at a not numerously attended open air meeting in 'Chad-
wick's Orchard' — which blossoms in nothing but red bricks.
Here, the chairman of yesterday presided in a cart, from which
speeches were delivered. The proceedings commenced with the
following sufficiently general and discursive hymn, given out
by a workman from Burnley, and sung in long metre by the
whole audience:
'Assembled beneath thy broad blue sky,
To thee, O God, thy children cry.
Thy needy creatures on Thee call,
For thou art great and good to all.
'Thy bounty smiles on every side,
And no good thing hast thou denied;
But men of wealth and men of power,
Like locusts, all our gifts devour.
'Awake, ye sons of toil! nor sleep
While millions starve, while millions weep;
Demand your rights; let tyrants see
You are resolved that you '11 be free.'
Mr. Hollins's Sovereign Mill was open all this time. It
is a very beautiful mill, containing a large amount of valuable
machinery, to which some recent ingenious improvements have
been added. Four hundred people could find employment in
it ; there were eighty-five at work, of whom five had 'come in'
that morning. They looked, among the vast array of motion-
less power-looms, like a few remaining leaves in a wintry for-
est, They were protected by the police (very prudently not
obtruded on the scenes I have described), and were stared at
every day when they came out, by a crowd which had never
been large in reference to the numbers on strike, and had di-
ON STRIKE 427
minished to a score or two. One policeman at the door suf-
ficed to keep order then. These eighty-five were people of ex-
ceedingly decent appearance, chiefly women, and were evi-
dently not in the least uneasy for themselves. I heard of one
girl among them, and only one, who had been hustled and
struck in a dark street.
In any aspect in which it can be viewed, this strike and
lock-out is a deplorable calamity. In its waste of time, in its
waste of a great people's energy, in its waste of wages, in its
waste of wealth that seeks to be employed, in its encroachment
on the means of many thousands who are labouring from day
to day, in the gulf of separation it hourly deepens between
those whose interests must be understood to be identical or
must be destroyed, it is a great national affliction. But, at
this pass, anger is of no use, starving out is of no use — for
what will that do, five years hence, but overshadow all the mills
in England with the growth of a bitter remembrance? — po-
litical economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a little human
covering and filling out, a little human bloom upon it, and a
little human warmth in it. Gentlemen are found, in great man-
ufacturing towns, ready enough to extol imbecile mediation
with dangerous madmen abroad ; can none of them be brought
to think of authorised mediation and explanation at home?
I do not suppose that such a knotted difficulty as this, is to be
at all untangled by a morning-party in the Adelphi ; but I
would entreat both sides now so miserably opposed, to consider
whether there are no men in England, above suspicion, to
whom they might refer the matters in dispute, with a perfect
confidence above all things in the desire of those men to act
justly, and in their sincere attachment to their countrymen of
every rank and to their country. Masters right, or men right ;
masters wrong, or men wrong ; both right, or both wrong ;
there is certain ruin to both in the continuance or frequent re-
vival of this breach. And from the ever-widening circle of
their decay, what drop in the social ocean shall be free !
428 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
THE LATE MR. JUSTICE TALFOURD
[MARCH 25, 1854]
THE readers of these pages will have known, many days before
the present number can come into their hands, that on Monday
the thirteenth of March, this upright judge and good man
died suddenly at Stafford in the discharge of his duties.
Mercifully spared protracted pain and mental decay, he passed
away in a moment, with words of Christian eloquence, of broth-
erly tenderness and kindness towards all men, yet unfinished
on his lips.
As he died, he had always lived. So amiable a man, so gen-
tle, so sweet-tempered, of such a noble simplicity, so perfectly
unspoiled by his labours and their rewards, is very rare indeed
upon this earth. These lines are traced by the faltering hand
of a friend ; but none can so fully know how true they are, as
those who knew him under all circumstances, and found him
ever the same.
In his public aspects ; in his poems, in his speeches, on th'e
bench, at the bar, in Parliament; he was widely appreciated,
honoured, and beloved. Inseparable as his great and varied
abilities were from himself in life, it is yet to himself and not
to them, that affection in its first grief naturally turns. They
remain, but he is lost.
The chief delight of his life was to give delight to others.
His nature was so exquisitely kind, that to be kind was its
highest happiness. Those who had the privilege of seeing
him in his own home when his public successes were greatest, — •
so modest, so contented with little things, so interested in hum-
ble persons and humble efforts, so surrounded by children and
young people, so adored in remembrance of a domestic gener-
osity and greatness of heart too sacred to be unveiled here,
can never forget the pleasure of that sight.
If ever there were a house, in England, justly celebrated for
the reverse of the picture, where every art was honoured for its
own sake, and where every visitor was received for his own
claims and merits, that house was his. It was in this respect a
LATE MR. JUSTICE TALFOURD 429
great example, as sorely needed as it will be sorely missed.
Rendering all legitimate deference to rank and riches, there
never was a man more composedly, unaffectedly, quietly, im-
movable by such considerations than the subject of this sor-
rowing remembrance. On the other hand, nothing would
have astonished him so much as the suggestion that he was
anybody's patron or protector. His dignity was ever of
that highest and purest sort which has no occasion to proclaim
itself, and which is not in the least afraid of losing itself.
In the first joy of his appointment to the judicial bench, he
made a summer-visit to the sea-shore, 'to share his exultation
in the gratification of his long-cherished ambition, with the
friend' — now among the many friends who mourn his death
and lovingly recall his virtues. Lingering in the bright
moonlight at the close of a happy day, he spoke of his new
functions, of his sense of the great responsibility he under-
took, and of his placid belief that the habits of his professional
life rendered him equal to their efficient discharge; but, above
all, he spoke, with an earnestness never more to be separated in
his friend's mind from the murmur of the sea upon a moon-
light night, of his reliance on the strength of his desire to do
right before God and man. He spoke with his own single-
ness of heart, and his solitary hearer knew how deep and true
his purpose was. They passed, before parting for the night,
into a playful dispute at what age he should retire, and what
he would do at three-score years and ten. And ah ! within five
short years, it is all ended like a dream !
But, by the strength of his desire to do right, he was ani-
mated to the last moment of his existence. Who, knowing
England at this time, would wish to utter with his last breath
a more righteous warning than that its curse is ignorance, or
a miscalled education which is as bad or worse, and a want of
the exchange of innumerable graces and sympathies among
the various orders of society, each hardened unto each and
holding itself aloof? Well will it be for us and for our chil-
dren, if those dying words be never henceforth forgotten on
the Judgment Seat.
An example in his social intercourse to those who are born
to station, an example equally to those who win it for them-
430 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
selves; teaching the one class to abate its stupid pride: the
other, to stand upon its eminence, not forgetting the road by
which it got there, and fawning upon no one ; the conscientious
judge, the charming writer and accomplished speaker, the gen-
tle-hearted, guileless, affectionate man, has entered on a
brighter world. Very, very many have lost a friend ; nothing
in Creation has lost an enemy.
The hand that lays this poor flower on his grave, was a
mere boy's when he first clasped it — newly come from the work
in which he himself began life — little used to the plough it has
followed since — obscure enough, with much to correct and
learn. Each of its successive tasks through many intervening
years has been cheered by his warmest interest, and the friend-
ship then begun has ripened to maturity in the passage of
time; but there was no more self-assertion or condescension in
his winning goodness at first, than at last. The success of
other men made as little change in him as his own.
IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN
[SEPTEMBER 2, 1854]
ALL newspaper-readers are probably on familiar terms with
this phrase. It is not generally known that her Majesty's
screw line-of-battle ship Hogarth, one hundred and twenty,
was precisely seven years, seven months, seven days, seven
hours, and seven minutes, on the stocks in Portsmouth Yard.
It is not generally known that there is now in the garden of
Mr. Pips, of Camberwell, a gooseberry weighing upwards of
three ounces, the growth of a tree which Mr. Pips has reared
entirely on warm toast and water. It is not generally known
that on the last rent day of the estates of the Earl of Boozle,
of Castle Boozle, his lordship remitted to his tenants five per
cent, on all the amounts then paid up, and afterwards regaled
them on the good old English cheer of roast beef and hum-
ming ale. (It is not generally known that ale in this connec-
tion always hums.) It is not generally known that a testi-
monial in the form of a magnificent silver centre-piece and
IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN 431
candelabra, weighing five hundred ounces, was on Tuesday last
presented to Cocker Doodle, Esquire, F.S.A., at a splendid
banquet given him by a brilliant circle of his friends and ad-
mirers, in testimony, no less of their admiration of his quali-
ties as a man, than of anything else you like to fill up the
blank with. It is not generally known that when Admiral
Sir Charles Napier was junior post-captain on the African
station, looking out for slavers, his ship was one day boarded
by a strange craft, in the stern sheets of which sat a genuine
specimen of the true British seaman, who, as he dropped along-
side, exclaimed in the voice of a Stentor, 'Avast heaving i Old
Charley, ahoy !' Upon this, the admiral, then post-captain,
who chanced at the moment to be pacing the quarter-deck with
his telescope at his eye (which it is not generally known he
never removes except at meals and when asleep) looked good-
humouredly over the starboard bulwarks, and responded, wav-
ing his cocked hat, 'Tom Gaff, ahoy, and I am glad to see you,
my lad !' They had never met since the year eighteen hun-
dred and fourteen, but Tom Gaff, like a true fok'sle salt, had
never forgotten his old rough and tough first luff (as he char-
acteristically called him) and had now come from another part
of the station on leave of absence, two hundred and fifty miles
in an open boat, expressly to get a glimpse of his former offi-
cer, of whose brilliant career he was justly proud. It is need-
less to add that all hands were piped to grog, and that Tom
and old Charley were mutually pleased. But it is not generally
known that they exchanged tobacco boxes, and that if when
'Old Charley' hoisted his broad pennant in proud command
of the Baltic fleet, his gallant heart beat higher than usual, it
pressed, as if for sympathy, against Tom Gaff's tobacco-box,
to which his left-hand waistcoat pocket is on all occasions de-
voted. Similarly, many other choice events, chiefly reserved
for the special London correspondents of country newspapers,
are not generally known : including gifts of various ten-pound
notes, by her gracious Majesty when a child, to various old
women ; and the constant sending of innumerable loyal pres-
ents, principally cats and cheeses, to Buckingham Palace.
One thing is sure to happen. Codgers becomes a celebrated
public character, or a great capitalist. Then it is not gener-
432 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ally known that in the year eighteen hundred and blank, there
stood, one summer evening on old London Bridge, a way-worn
boy eating a penny loaf, and eyeing the passengers wistfully.
Whom Mr. Flam of the Minories — attracted by something un-
usual in the boy's appearance — was induced to bestow sixpence
on, and to invite to dinner every Sunday at one o'clock for
seven years. This boy was Codgers, and it is not generally
known that the tradition is still preserved with pride in Mr.
Flam's family.
Now, it appears to me that several small circumstances of
a different kind have lately happened, or are yet happening,
about us, which can hardly be generally known, or, if known,
generally appreciated. And as this is vacation-time, when
most of us have some leisure for gossiping, I will enumerate a
few.
It is not generally known that in this present year one
thousand eight hundred and fifty-four, the English people of
the middle classes are a mob of drunkards more beastly than
the Russian courtiers under Peter the Great. It is not gener-
ally known that this is the national character. It is not gen-
erally known that a multitude of our countrymen taken at
random from the sense, industry, self-denial, self-respect, and
household virtues of this nation, repairing to the Exhibition
at Sydenham, make it their business to get drunk there immedi-
ately ; to struggle and fight with one another, to tear one an-
other's clothes off, and to smash and throw down the statues.
I say, this is not generally known to be so. Yet I find this
picture, in a fit of temperate enthusiasm, presented to the peo-
ple by an artist who is one of themselves, in pages addressed
to themselves. I am even informed by a temperate journal,
that the artist saw these facts, in this said Exhibition at Syden-
ham, with his own bodily eyes. Well ! I repeat, this is a state
of things not generally known.
It is not generally known, I believe, that the two scarcest
books in England are The Pilgrim's Progress and The Vicar
of Wakefield. Yet I find that the present American Minister
(perfectly familiar with England) communicated the surpris-
ing intelligence to a company, assembled not long ago, at
Fishmongers' Hall. It is not generally known perhaps, that
IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN 433
in expatiating on the education of his countrymen His Ex-
cellency remarked of these two rare works, that while they
were to be met with in every cabin in the United States, they
were 'comparatively little known in England' — not generally
known, that is to say.
It is not generally known, and if it were recorded of our
English Institutions, say by a French writer, would not, I
think, be generally believed; that there is any court of justice
in England, in which an individual gravely concerned in the
case under inquiry, can twice call the advocate opposed to
him, a Ruffian, in open court, under the judge's nose and
within the judge's hearing. Is it generally known that such a
case occurred this last July, and was nobody's business?
It is not generally known that the people have nothing to
do with a certain large Club which assembles at Westminster,
and that the Club has nothing to do with them. It is simply
an odd anomaly that the members of the Club happen to be
elected by a body who don't belong to the Club at all; the
pleasure and business of the Club being, not with that body,
but with what its own members say and do. Look to the re-
ports of the Club's proceedings. In January, the right hand
says it is the left hand that has abetted the slanders on 'an
illustrious personage,' and the left hand says it is the right
hand. In February, Mr. Pot comes down on Mr. Kettle, and
Mr. Kettle requests to be taken from his cradle and followed
by inches to that honourable hob. In the same month, the
forefinger of the left hand hooks itself on with Mosaic- Arabian
pertinacity to the two forefingers of the right hand, and never
lets go any more. In March, the most delightful excitement
of the whole session is about a club dinner-party. In April,
there is Easter. In May, there is infinite Club-joy over per-
sonal Mosaic-Arabia, and personal Admiralty. In June, A
relieves himself of the mild suggestion that B is 'an extraor-
dinary bold apostate' : when in cuts C, who has nothing to do
with it, and the whole alphabet fall together by the ears. In
August, Home Office takes up his colleague Under Treasury,
for talking 'sheer nonsense.' In the same month, prorogation.
Through the whole time, one perpetual clatter of 'What did
I say, what did you say, what did he say ? Yes I will, no you
434
won't, yes I did, no you didn't, yes I shall, no you shan't'—
and no such thing as what do tliey say? (those few people out-
side there ) ever heard of !
It is not generally known, perhaps, to what lengths, in
these times, the pursuit of an object, and a cheer or a laugh,
will carry a Member of this Club I am speaking of. It can-
not have been generally observed, as it appears to me (for I
have met with no just indignation on the subject), how far
one of its members was thus carried, a very little while ago.
Here is the case. A Board is to be got rid of. I oppose this
Board. I have long opposed it. It is possible that my offi-
cial opposition may have very considerably increased its diffi-
culties and crippled its efficiency. I am bent upon a jocose
speech, and a pleasant effect. I stand up in the heart of the
metropolis of the world. From every quarter of the world,
a dreadful disease which is peculiarly the scourge of the many,
because the many are the poor, ill-fed, and badly housed —
whereas I, being of the few, am neither — is closing in around
me. It is coming from my low, nameless countrymen, the
rank and file at Varna ; it is coming from the hot sands of In-
dia, and the cold waters of Russia; it is in France; it is in
Naples ; it is in the stifling Vicoli of Genoa, where I read ac-
counts of the suffering people that should make my heart
compassionate, if anything in this world can ; nay, it has be-
gun to strike down many victims in this city where I speak, as
I the speaker cannot fail to know — must know — am bound to
know — do know thoroughly well. But I want a point. I
have it! lThe cholera is always coming "when the powers of
this Board are about to expire (A LAUGH).' This well-timed
joke of mine, so neatly made upon the greatest misery and
direst calamity that human nature can endure, will be repeated
to-morrow in the same newspaper which will carry to my hon-
ourable friends here, through electric telegraph, the tidings
of a troop-ship put back to Plymouth, with this very pesti-
lence on board. What are all such trifles to me? I wanted
a laugh ; I have got a laugh. Talk to me of the agony and
death of men and brothers ! Am I not a Lord and a Mem-
ber!
Now, is it generally known, I wonder, that this indecency
IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN 435
happened? Have the people of such a place as Totnes
chanced to hear of it? Or will they ever hear of it, and shall
we ever hear of their having heard of it?
It is not generally known that an entirely new principle
has begun to obtain in legislation, and is gaining wider and
broader recognition every day. I allude to the profoundly
wise principle of legislating with a constant reference and def-
erence to the worst members of society, and almost excluding
from consideration the comfort and convenience of the best.
The question, 'what do the decent mechanic and his family
want, or deserve?' always yields, under this enlightened pres-
sure, to the question, 'what will the vagabond idler, drunkard,
or jail-bird, turn to bad account?' As if there were anything
in the wide world which the dregs of humanity will turn to
good account ! And as if the shadow of the convict-ship
and Newgate drop had any business, in the plainest sense or
justice, to be cast, from January to December, on honest hard-
working, steady Job Smith's family fireside 1
Yet Job Smith suffers heavily, at every turn of his life, and
at every inch of its straight course too, from the determined
ruffianism in which he has no more part than he has in the
blood Royal. Six days of Job's week are days of hard,
monotonous, exhausting work. Upon the seventh, Job thinks
that he, his old woman, and the children, could find it in their
hearts to walk in a garden if they might, or to look at a pic-
ture, or a plant, or a beast of the forest or even a colossal toy
made in imitation of some of the wonders of the world. Most
people would be apt to think Job reasonable in this. But, up
starts Britannia, tearing her hair and crying, 'Never, never !
Here is Sloggins with the broken nose, the black eye, and the
bulldog. What Job Smith uses, Sloggins will abuse. There-
fore, Job Smith must not use.' So, Job sits down again in a
killing atmosphere, a little weary and out of humour, or leans
against a post all Sunday long.
It is not generally known that this accursed Sloggins is the
evil genius of Job's life. Job never had in his possession at
any one time, a little cask of beer, or a bottle of spirits.
What he and his family drink in that way, is fetched, in very
small portions indeed, from the public house. However dif-
436 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ficult the Westminster Club-gentlemen may find it to realise
such an existence, Job has realised it through many a long
year; and he knows, infinitely better than the whole Club can
tell him, at what hour he wants his 'drop of beer,' and how it
best suits his means and convenience to get it. Against which
practical conviction of Job's, Britannia, tearing her hair
again, shrieks tenderly, 'Sloggins ! Sloggins with the broken
nose, the black eye, and the bulldog, will go to ruin,' — as if
he were ever going anywhere else ! — 'if Job Smith has his beer
when he wants it.' So, Job gets it when Britannia thinks it
good for Sloggins to let him have it, and marvels greatly.
But, perhaps he marvels most, when, being invited in im-
mense type, to go and hear the Evangelist of Eloquence, or
the Apostle of Purity (I have noticed in such invitations,
rather lofty, not to say audacious titles), he strays in at an
open door, and finds a personage on a stage, crying aloud to
him, 'Behold me! I, too, am Sloggins!! I likewise had a
broken nose, a black eye, and a bulldog. Survey me well.
Straight is my nose, white is my eye, deceased is my bulldog.
I, formerly Sloggins, now Evangelist (or Apostle, as the case
may be), cry aloud in the wilderness unto you Job Smith, that
in respect that I was formerly Sloggins and am now Saintly,
therefore you Job Smith, ( who were never Sloggins, or in the
least like him), shall, by force of law, accept what I accept,
deny what I deny, take upon yourself My shape, and follow
Me.' Now, it is not generally known that poor Job, though
blest with an average understanding, and thinking any putting
out of the way of that ubiquitous Sloggins a meritorious ac-
tion highly to be commended, never can understand the appli-
cation of all this to himself, who never had anything in com-
mon with Sloggins, but always abominated and abjured him.
It is not generally known that Job Smith is fond of music.
But, he is ; he has a decided natural liking for it. The Italian
Opera being rather dear (Sloggins would disturb the perform-
ance if he were let in cheap), Job's taste is not highly culti-
vated ; still, music pleases him and softens him, and he takes
such recreation in the way of hearing it as his small means
can buy. Job is fond of a play, also. He is not without the
universal taste implanted in the child and the savage, and sur-
IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN 437
viving in the educated mind ; and a representation by men and
women, of the joys and sorrows, crimes and virtues, sufferings
and triumphs, of this mortal life, has a strong charm for him.
Job is not much of a dancer, but he likes well enough to see
dancing, and his eldest boy is up to it, and he himself can
shake a leg in a good plain figure on occasion. For all these
reasons, Job now and then, in. his rare holidays, is to be
found at a cheap concert, a cheap theatre, or a cheap dance.
And here one might suppose he would be left in peace to take
his money's worth if he can find it.
It is not generally known, however, that against these poor
amusements, an army rises periodically and terrifies the in-
offensive Job to death. It is not generally known why. On
account of Sloggins. Five-and-twenty prison chaplains, good
men and true, have each got Sloggins hard and fast, and con-
verted him. Sloggins, in five-and-twenty solitary cells at once,
has told the five-and-twenty chaplains all about it. Child
of evil as he is, with every drop of blood in his body circulat-
ing lies all through him, night and day these five-and-twenty
years, Sloggins is nevertheless become the embodied spirit of
Truth. Sloggins has declared 'that Amusements done it.'
Sloggins has made manifest that 'Harmony brought him to it.'
Sloggins has asserted that 'the draymer set him a nockin his
old mother's head again the wall.' Sloggins has made mani-
fest 'that it was the double-shuffle wot kep him out of church.'
Sloggins has written the declaration, 'Dear Sir if i hadn seen
the oprer Frardeaverler i shouldn dear Sir have been overag-
grawated into the folli of beatin Betsey with a redot poker.'
Sloggins warmly recommends that all Theatres be shut up for
good, all Dancing Rooms pulled down, and all music stopped.
Considers that nothing else is people's ruin. Is certain that
but for sitch, he would now be in a large way of business and
universally respected. Consequently, all the five-and-twenty,
in five-and-twenty honest and sincere reports, do severally urge
that the requirements and deservings of Job Smith be in no-
wise considered or cared for; that the natural and deeply
rooted cravings of mankind be plucked up and trodden out ;
that Sloggins's gospel be the gospel for the conscientious and
industrious part of the world ; that Sloggins rule the land and
438
rule the waves; and that Britons unto Sloggins ever, ever,
ever, shall — be — slaves.
I submit that this great and dangerous mistake cannot be
too generally known or generally thought about.
LEGAL AND EQUITABLE JOKES
[SEPTEMBER 23, 1854]
I AM what Sydney Smith called that favourite animal of Whig
governments, a barrister of seven years' standing. If I were
to say of seventeen years' standing, I should not go beyond
the mark ; if I were even to say of seven-and-twenty, I might
not go beyond the mark. But, I am not bound to commit my-
self, and therefore on this point I say no more.
Of course I, as a barrister of the rightful amount of stand-
ing, mourn over the decline of the profession. How have I
seen it wither and decay! Within my time, John Doe and
Richard Roe themselves, have fallen victims to the prejudice
and ignorance of mere laymen. In my time, the cheerful
evening sittings at the Old Bailey in the city of London have
been discontinued; those merry meetings, after dinners where
I do not hesitate to say I have seen more wine drunk in two
or three hours, and have heard better things said, than at any
other convivial assemblies of which it has been my good for-
tune to make one. Lord bless me ! When I think of the jolly
Ordinary mixing his famous salads, the Judges discussing
vintages with the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, the leading humor-
ists of the Old Bailey bar delighting the Aldermen and visitors,
and the whole party going socially back again into court, to
try a fellow creature, perhaps for his or her life, in the genial
glow produced by such an entertainment — I say when I think
of these departed glories, and the commonplace stupidity into
which we have fallen, I do not, and I cannot, wonder that Eng-
land is going to ruin.
As my name is not appended to this paper, and therefore I
can hardly be suspected by the public of egotism, I will re-
mark that I have always had a pretty turn for humour. I
LEGAL AND EQUITABLE JOKES 489
have a keen enjoyment of a joke. Like those excellent wit-
nesses, the officers of the forty-sixth regiment (better wit-
nesses I never saw, even in a horse-dealer's case, — yet the pub-
lic, in these degenerate days, has no sympathy with them),
I don't at all object to its being practical. I like a joke to
be legal or equitable, because my tastes are in that direction ;
but I like it none the worse for being practical. And indeed
the best legal and equitable j okes remaining, are all of a prac-
tical nature.
I use the word remaining, inasmuch as the levelling spirit
of the times has destroyed some of the finest practical jokes
connected with the profession. I look upon the examination
of the parties in a cause, for instance, as a death-blow given
to humour. Nothing can be more humorous than to make a
solemn pretence of inquiring into the truth, and exclude the
two people who in nine cases out of ten know most about it.
Yet this is now a custom of the past, and so are a hundred
other whimsical drolleries in which the fathers and grand-
fathers of the bar delighted.
But, I am going on to present within a short compass a
little collection of existing practical jokes — mere samples of
many others happily still left us in law and equity for our
innocent amusement. As I never (though I set up for a hu-
morist) tell another man's story as my own, I will name my
authority before I conclude.
The great expense of the simplest suit in equity, and the
droll laws which force all English subjects into a court of
equity for their sole redress, in an immense number of cases,
lead, at this present day, to a very entertaining class of prac-
tical joke. I mean that ludicrous class in which the joke con-
sists of a man's taking and keeping possession of money or
other property to which he even pretends to have no shadow
of right, but which he seizes because he knows that the whole
will be swallowed up in costs if the rightful owner should seek
to assert his claim. I will relate a few stories of this kind.
JOKE OF A WITTY TRUSTEE
A wag, being left trustee under a will by which the testator
left a small freehold property to be sold for charitable pur-
440 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
poses, sold it, and discovered the trust to be illegal. As the
fund was too small in amount to bear a suit in equity (being
not above sixty pounds), he laughed very heartily at the next
of kin, pocketed it himself, spent it, and died.
JOKE OF A MEDICAL, CHOICE SPIRIT
A country surgeon got a maundering old lady to appoint
him sole executor of her will, by which she left the bulk of her
small property to her brother and sister. What does this
pleasant surgeon, on the death of the maundering old lady,
but prove the will, get in the property, make out a bill for
professional attendance to the tune of two or three hundred
pounds, which absorbs it all; cry to the brother and sister,
'Boh ! Chancery ! Catch me if you can !' and live happy ever
afterwards.
JOKE AGAINST SOME UNLUCKY CREDITORS
Certain creditors being left altogether without mention in
the will of their deceased debtor, brought a suit in equity for
a decree to sell his property. The decree was obtained. But,
the property realising seven hundred pounds, and the suit cost-
ing seven hundred and fifty, these creditors brought their pigs
to a fine market, and made much amusement for the Chancery
Bar.
JOKES UPON INFANTS
An application to the Court of Chancery, in a friendly suit
where nobody contested anything, to authorise trustees to ad-
vance a thousand pounds out of an estate, to educate some in-
fants, cost a hundred and three pounds, fourteen, and six-
pence; a similar application for the same authority, to the
same trustees, under the same will, in behalf of some other in-
fants, costs the same; twenty similar applications, under the
same will, for similar power to the same trustees, in behalf of
twenty other infants, or sets of infants, as their wants arise,
will cost, each the same.
A poor national schoolmaster insured his life for two hun-
LEGAL AND EQUITABLE JOKES 441
dred pounds, and made a will, giving discretionary power to
his executors to apply the money for the benefit of his two
children while under age, and then to divide it between them.
One of the executors doubted whether under this will, after
payment of debts and duty, he could appropriate the princi-
pal (that word not being used in the instrument) to buying
the two small children into an orphan asylum. The sanction
of the Court of Chancery would cost at least half the fund ;
so nothing can be done, and the two small children are to be
educated and brought up, on four pounds ten a year between
them.
JOKE AGAINST MRS. HARRIS
Mrs. Harris is left the dividends on three thousand pounds
stock, for her life; the capital on her decease to be divided
among legatees. Mr. Spodger is trustee under the will which
so provides for Mrs. Harris. Mr. Spodger one day dies in-
testate. To Mr. Spodger's effects Mr. B. Spodger and Miss
Spodger, his brother and sister, administer. Miss Spodger
takes it into her head that nothing shall ever induce her to
have anything to do with Mrs. Harris's trust-stock. Mrs.
Harris, consequently unable to receive her dividends, petitions
Court of Equity. Court of Equity delivers judgment that it
can only order payment of dividends actually due when Mrs.
Harris petitions; that, as fresh dividends keep on coming due,
Mrs. Harris must keep on freshly petitioning; and that Mrs.
Harris must, according to her Catechism, 'walk in the same
all the days of her life.' So Mrs. Harris walks, at the pres-
ent time ; paying for every such application eighteen pounds,
two, and eightpence; or thirty per cent, on her unfortunate
income.
I am of opinion that it would be hard to invent better prac-
tical jokes than these, over which I have laughed until my
sides were sore. They are neatly and pointedly related by
Mr. Graham Willmore, queen's counsel and a county court
judge, in his evidence, given in May of the present year, be-
fore a committee of the House of Commons appointed to in-
quire into the state and practice of the county courts. But,
442 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I am pained to add, nevertheless, that my learned friend Will-
more has not the slightest sense of humour, and is perfectly
destitute of any true perception of a joke.
For, what does he recommend in this same evidence of his?
Why, says he, these cases involve 'an absolute denial of jus-
tice' ; and, if you would give the county court judges a limited
jurisdiction in Equity, these things could not possibly occur;
for, then, such cases as the Witty Trustee's, and the Medical
Choice Spirit's, would be determined on their merits, for a few
pounds: while such applications as those in behalf of the In-
fants would be disposed of for a few shillings. But, what,
I ask my learned friend, would become of the cream of the
jokes? Are we to have no jokes? Would he make law and
equity a dull, dreary transaction of plain right and wrong?
I shall hear, next, of proposals to take our wigs off, and make
Us like common men. A few pounds too! And a few shil-
lings! Has my learned friend no idea that hundreds of
pounds are far more respectable — not to say profitable —
than a few pounds and a few shillings? He may buy sundry
pairs of boots for a few pounds, or divers pairs of stockings
for a few shillings. Is not Equity more precious than boots ?
Or Law than stockings?
I am further of opinion that my learned friend Willmore
falls into all his numerous mistakes before this committee, by
reason of this one curious incapacity in his constitution to en-
joy a joke. For instance, he relates the following excellent
morsel :
JEST CONCERNING A SEA-CAPTAIN
A sea-captain ejected from his ship a noisy drunken man,
who misconducted himself; and at the same time turned out
certain pot-companions of the drunken man, who were as trou-
blesome as he. Bibo (so to call the drunken man) bringeth
an action against the captain for assault and battery ; to which
the captain pleadeth in justification that he removed the plain-
tiff 'and certain persons unknown,' from his ship, for that they
did misbehave themselves. 'Aye,' quoth the learned counsel
for Bibo, at the trial, 'but there be seventeen objections to that
plea, whereof the main one is that it appeareth that the cer-
LEGAL AND EQUITABLE JOKES 443
tain persons are known and not unknown, as by thee set forth.'
'Marry,' crieth the court, 'but that is fatal, Gentlemen of the
Jury !' Verdict accordingly, with leave unto the sea-captain
to move the Court of Queen's Bench in solemn argument.
This being done with great delay and expense, the sea-captain
(all the facts being perfectly plain from the first) at length
got judgment in his favour. But, no man to this hour hath
been able to make him comprehend how he got it, or why ; or
wherefore the suit was not decided on the merits when first
tried. Which this wooden-headed seaman, staring straight
before him with all his might, unceasingly maintains that it
ought to have been.
Now, this surely is, in all respects, an admirable story,
representing the density, obstinacy, and confusion of the sea-
captain in a richly absurd light. Does my learned friend
Willmore relish it? Not in the least. His dull remark upon
it is : That in the county court the case would have been ad-
judicated on its merits, for less than a hundredth part of the
costs incurred : and that he would so alter the law of the land
as to deprive a plaintiff suing in a superior court in such an
action (which we call an action of tort) and recovering less
than twenty pounds, of all claim to costs, unless the judge
should certify it to be a fit case to be tried in that superior
court, rather than to have been taken to the county court at a
small expense, and at once decided.
Precisely the same obtuseness pervades the very next sug-
gestion of my learned friend. It has always appeared to me
a good joke that county courts having a jurisdiction in cases
of contract up to fifty pounds, should not also have a jurisdic-
tion in cases of tort up to the same amount. As usual, my
learned friend Willmore cannot perceive the joke. He says,
in his commonplace way, 'I think it is the general desire that
the jurisdiction should be given' ; arid puts as an illustration —
'Suppose a gentleman's carriage is run against. The dam-
ages may be fifty pounds. In the case of a costermonger's
donkey-cart, they may be fifty pence; the facts being iden-
tically the same.' Now, this, I am of opinion, is prosaic in
the last degree.
444 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Passing over my learned friend's inclinings towards giving
the county courts jurisdiction in matters of bankruptcy; and
also in criminal cases now disposed of, not much to anybody's
satisfaction he seems to consider at Quarter Sessions — where,
by the bye, I have known admirable practical jokes played
off from the Bench ; and towards making a Court of Appeal
of a selection from county court judges; I will come to his
crowning suggestion. He is not happier in this than in his
other points, for it strikes at the heart of the excellent j oke of
putting the public in this dilemma, 'If you WILL have law
cheap, you shall have an inferior article.'
Without the least tenderness for this jest — which is unctu-
ous, surprising, inconsequential, practical, overflowing with
all the characteristics of a wild and rollicking humour — my
learned friend knocks the soul out of it with a commonplace
sledge-hammer. I hold, says he, that you should have, for
county court judges who deal with an immense variety of intri-
cate and important questions, the very best men. 'I think there
is great mischief in the assumption that when a man is made
a county court judge, he never can be anything else. I think
if the reverse were assumed — if the appointment as county
court judge were not considered a bar to a man's professional
advancement, you would have better men candidates for the
office. You would have the whole body of talent in the pro-
fession willing to go through the previous state of probation,
as it would then be, of a county court judgeship. You must
not expect a permanent succession of able, conscientious men,
competently trained and educated for such an appointment,
if it is to be a final one at the present pay. The county court
judge, especially in the provinces, is placed in a painful and
false position. He is made a magistrate, and must associate
with his brother justices. If he lives at all as they do, he
perhaps spends more than he can afford ; he certainly can lay
up nothing for his family. If he does not, he will probably
meet with slights and disparagement, to which, I think, he
ought not to be subjected, and which impair his efficiency.'
He believes also that if the Court of Appeal were established,
and the other county court judges were, as vacancies occurred,
to be appointed members of it, according to circumstances,
LEGAL AND EQUITABLE JOKES 445
'the public would derive another advantage in not being
obliged to take, as a judge of the superior courts, a purely un-
tried man. They would have a man exercised both in Nisi
Prius and in bane work, and exercised in the face of the public
and the profession, instead of having a man taken because he
has a certain standing as an advocate, or because he has cer-
tain political recommendations. I think it would be a much
more certain mode of testing the merits of a man previous to
his appointment as a judge in the superior courts.'
So, for the good old joke of fobbing the public off, when it
is perverse in its demands, with half a second-rate loaf, instead
of enough of the best bread; for the joke of putting an edu-
cated and trained gentleman, in a public station and discharg-
ing most important social functions, at a social disadvantage
among a class not the least stiff-necked and purse-proud of all
classes known between the British Channel and Abyssinia ; for
the joke, in short, of systematically overpaying the national
Shows and underpaying the national Substances ; my learned
friend Willmore has not the slightest tenderness ! I am of
opinion that he does not see it at all. He winds up his evi-
dence with the following extraordinarily flat remark:
'I think that the public attention ought to be very point-
edly directed to the fact, that while in the rich man's superior
courts the suitors pay nothing towards the salaries of judges,
officers, etc., yet in the poor man's county courts the suitors
are taxed to pay for all these, and something extra, by which
the state is mean enough to make a small profit. I cannot
understand how any one, except, perhaps, a very timid Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, could justify or even tolerate an in-
justice so gross, so palpable, and cruel.'
On the whole, therefore, it appears to me, and I am of
opinion : That, if many such men as my learned friend Will-
more were to secure a hearing, the vast and highly-entertain-
ing collection of our legal and equitable jokes would be
speedily brought to a close for ever. That, the object of such
dull persons clearly is, to make Law and Equity intelligible
and useful, and to cause them both to do justice and to be
respected. Finally, that to clear out lumber, sweep away
dust, bring down cobwebs, and destroy a vast amount of ex-
446 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
pensive practical joking, is no joke, but quite the reverse, and
never will be considered humorous in any court in Westminster
Hall.
TO WORKING MEN
[OCTOBER 7, 1854]
IT behoves every journalist, at this time when the memory of
an awful pestilence1 is fresh among us, and its traces are visi-
ble at every turn in various affecting aspects of poverty and
desolation, which any of us can see who are not purposely
blind, to warn his readers, whatsoever be their ranks and con-
ditions, that unless they set themselves in earnest to improve
the towns in which they live, and to amend the dwellings of the
poor, they are guilty, before GOD, of wholesale murder.
The best of our journals have so well remembered their re-
sponsibility in this respect, and have so powerfully presented
the truth to the general conscience, that little remains to be
written on the urgent subject. But we would carry a forcible
appeal made by our contemporary the Times to the working
people of England a little further, and implore them — with
a view to their future avoidance of a fatal old mistake — to be-
ware of being led astray from their dearest interests, by high
political authorities on the one hand, no less than by shark-
ing mountebanks on the other. The noble lord, and the right
honourable baronet, and the honourable gentlemen, and the
honourable and learned gentleman, and the honourable and
gallant gentleman, and the whole of the honourable circle,
have, in their contests for place, power, and patronage, loaves
and fishes, distracted the working man's attention from his
first necessities, quite as much as the broken creature — once
a popular Misleader — who is now sunk in hopeless idiotcy in a
madhouse. To whatsoever shadows these may offer in lieu of
substances, it is now the first duty of The People to be reso-
lutely blind and deaf; firmly insisting, above all things, on
i Cholera outbreak in London, August and September, 1854.
TO WORKING MEN 447
their and their children's right to every means of life and
health that Providence has afforded for all, and firmly refus-
ing to allow their name to be taken in vain for any purpose,
by any party, until their homes are purified and the amplest
means of cleanliness and decency are secured to them.
We may venture to remark that this most momentous of all
earthly questions is one we are not now urging for the first
time. Long before this Journal came into existence, we sys-
tematically tried to turn Fiction to the good account of show-
ing the preventible wretchedness and misery in which the mass
of the people dwell, and of expressing again and again the
conviction, founded upon observation, that the reform of their
habitations must precede all other reforms ; and that without
it, all other reforms must fail. Neither Religion nor Educa-
tion will make any way, in this nineteenth century of Chris-
tianity, until a Christian government shall have discharged
its first obligation, and secured to the people Homes, instead
of polluted dens.
Now, any working man of common intelligence knows per-
fectly well, that one session of parliament zealously devoted
to this object would secure its attainment. If he do not also
know perfectly well that a government or a parliament will
of itself originate nothing to save his life, he may know it
by instituting a very little inquiry. Let him inquire what
either power has done to better his social condition, since the
last great outbreak of disease five years ago. Let him inquire
what amount of attention from government, and what amount
of attendance in parliament, the question of that condition
has ever attracted, until one night in this last August, when
it became a personal question and a facetious question, and
when Lord Seymour, the member for Totnes, exhibited his
fitness for ever having been placed at the head of a great pub-
lic department by cutting jokes, which were received with
laughter, on the subject of the pestilence then raging. If the
working man, on such a review of plain facts, be satisfied that
without his own help he will not be helped, but will be pitilessly
left to struggle at unnatural odds with disease and death;
then let him bestir himself to set so monstrous a wrong right,
and let hire — for the time at least — dismiss from his mind all
448 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
other public questions, as straws in the balance. The glori-
ous right of voting for Lord This (say Seymour, for instance)
or Sir John That ; the intellectual state of Abyssinia ; the en-
dowment of the College of Maynooth; the paper duty; the
newspaper duty ; the five per cent. ; the twenty-five per cent. ;
the ten thousand hobby-horses that are exercised before him,
scattering so much dust in his eyes that he cannot see his own
hearth, until the cloud is suddenly fanned away by the wings
of the Angel of Death : all these distractions let him put aside,
holding steadily to one truth — 'Waking and sleeping, I and
mine are slowly poisoned. Imperfect development and pre-
mature decay are the lot of those who are dear to me as my
life. I bring children into the world to suffer unnaturally,
and to die when my Merciful Father would have them live.
The beauty of infancy is blotted out from my sight, and in
its stead sickliness and pain look at me from the wan mother's
knee. Shameful deprivation of the commonest appliances,
distinguishing the lives of human beings from the lives of
beasts, is my inheritance. My family is one of tens of thou-
sands of families who are set aside as food for pestilence.'
And let him then, being made in the form of man, resolve, 'I
will not bear it, and it shall not be!'
If working men will be thus true to themselves and one an-
other, there never was a time when they had so much just
sympathy and so much ready help at hand. The whole pow-
erful middle-class of this country, newly smitten with a sense
of self-reproach — far more potent with it, we fully believe,
than the lower motives of self-defence and fear — is ready to
join them. The utmost power of the press is eager to assist
them. But the movement, to be irresistible, must originate
with themselves, the suffering many. Let them take the initia-
tive, and call the middle-class to unite with them: which they
will do, heart and soul! Let the working people, in the me-
tropolis, in any one great town, but turn their intelligence,
their energy, their numbers, their power of union, their pa-
tience, their perseverance, in this straight direction in earnest
— and by Christmas, they shall find a government in Downing
Street and a House of Commons within hail of it, possessing
not the faintest family resemblance to the Indifferents and In-
TO WORKING MEN 449
capables last heard of in that slumberous neighbourhood.
It is only through a government so acted upon and so
forced to acquit itself of its first responsibility, that the in-
tolerable ills arising from the present nature of the dwellings
of the poor can be remedied. A Board of Health can do
much, but not near enough. Funds are wanted, and great
powers are wanted ; powers to over-ride little interests for the
general good; powers to coerce the ignorant, obstinate, and
slothful, and to punish all who, by any infraction of necessary
laws, imperil the public health. The working people and the
middle-class thoroughly resolved to have such laws, there is
no more choice left to all the Red Tape in Britain as to the
form in which it shall tie itself next, than there is option in
the barrel of a barrel-organ what tune it shall play.
But, though it is easily foreseen that such an alliance must
soon incalculably mitigate, and in the end annihilate, the dark
list of calamities resulting from sinful and cruel neglect which
the late visitation has — unhappily not for the first time — un-
veiled; it is impossible to set limits to the happy issues that
would flow from it. A better understanding between the two
great divisions of society, a habit of kinder and nearer ap-
proach, an increased respect and trustfulness on both sides,
a gently corrected method in each of considering the views of
the other, would lead to such blessed improvements and in-
terchanges among us, that even our narrow wisdom might
within the compass of a short time learn to bless the sickly
year in which so much good blossomed out of evil.
In the plainest sincerity, in affectionate sympathy, in the
ardent desire of our heart to do them some service, and to see
them take their place in the system which should bind us all
together, and bring home, to us all, the happiness of which
our necessarily varied conditions are all susceptible, we sub-
mit these few words to the working men. The time is ripe
for every one of them to raise himself and those who are dear
to him, at no man's cost, with no violence or injustice, with
cheerful help and support, with lasting benefit to the whole
community. Even the many among them at whose firesides
there will be vacant seats this winter, we address with hope.
However hard the trial and heavy the bereavement, there is
450 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
a far higher consolation in striving for the life that is left,
than in brooding with sullen eyes beside the grave.
AN UNSETTLED NEIGHBOURHOOD
[NOVEMBER 11, 1854]
IT is not my intention to treat of any of those new neighbour-
hoods which a wise legislature leaves to come into existence
just as it may happen ; overthrowing the trees, blotting out the
face of the country, huddling together labyrinths of odious
little streets of vilely constructed houses; heaping ugliness
upon ugliness, inconvenience upon inconvenience, dirt upon
dirt, and contagion upon contagion. Whenever a few hun-
dreds of thousands of people of the classes most enormously
increasing, shall happen to come to the conclusion that they
have suffered enough from preventible disease (a moral phe-
nomenon that may occur at any time), the said wise legis-
lature will find itself called to a heavy reckoning. May it
emerge from that extremity as agreeably as it slided in.
Amen!
No. The unsettled neighbourhood on which I have my
eye — in a literal sense, for I live in it, and am looking out of
window — cannot be called a new neighbourhood. It has been
in existence, how long shall I say? Forty, fifty, years. It
touched the outskirts of the fields, within a quarter of a cen-
tury ; at that period it was as shabby, dingy, damp, and mean
a neighbourhood, as one would desire not to see. Its poverty
was not of the demonstrative order. It shut the street-doors,
pulled down the blinds, screened the parlour-windows with the
wretchedest plants in pots, and made a desperate stand to
keep up appearances. The genteeler part of the inhabitants,
in answering knocks, got behind the door to keep out of
sight, and endeavoured to diffuse the fiction that a servant of
some sort was the ghostly warder. Lodgings were let, and
many more were to let; but, with this exception, signboards
and placards were discouraged. A few houses that became
afflicted in their lower extremities with eruptions of mangling
AN UNSETTLED NEIGHBOURHOOD 451
and clear-starching, were considered a disgrace to the neigh-
bourhood. The working bookbinder with the large door-
plate was looked down upon for keeping fowls, who were al-
ways going in and out. A corner house with 'Ladies' School'
on a board over the first floor windows, was barely tolerated
for its educational facilities ; and Miss Jamanne the dress-
maker, who inhabited two parlours, and kept an obsolete work
of art representing the Fashions, in the window of the front
one, was held at a marked distance by the ladies of the neigh-
bourhood— who patronised her, however, with far greater reg-
ularity than they paid her.
In those days, the neighbourhood was as quiet and dismal
as any neighbourhood about London. Its crazily built houses
— the largest, eight-roomed — were rarely shaken by any con-
veyance heavier than the spring van that came to carry off the
goods of a 'sold up' tenant. To be sold up was nothing
particular. The whole neighbourhood felt itself liable, at any
time, to that common casualty of life. A man used to come
into the neighbourhood regularly, delivering the summonses
for rates and taxes as if they were circulars. We never paid
anything until the last extremity, and Heaven knows how we
paid it then. The streets were positively hilly with the in-
equalities made in them by the man with the pickaxe who cut
off the company's supply of water to defaulters. It seemed
as if nobody had any money but old Miss Frowze, who lived
with her mother at Number fourteen Little Twig Street, and
who was rumoured to be immensely rich ; though I don't know
why, unless it was that she never went out of doors, and never
wore a cap, and never brushed her hair, and was immensely
dirty.
As to visitors, we really had no visitors at that time. Stab-
bers's Band used to come every Monday morning and play
for three quarters of an hour on one particular spot by the
Norwich Castle ; but, how they first got into a habit of coming,
or even how we knew them to be Stabbers's Band, I am unable
to say. It was popular in the neighbourhood, and we used
to contribute to it : dropping our halfpence into an exceed-
ingly hard hat with a warm handkerchief in it, like a sort of
bird's-nest (I am not aware whether it was Mr. Stabbers's hat
452 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
or not), which came regularly round. They used to open
with 'Begone, dull Care!' and to end with a tune which the
neighbourhood recognised as 'I'd rather have a Guinea than a
One-pound Note.' I think any reference to money, that was
not a summons or an execution, touched us melodiously. As
to Punches, they knew better than to do anything but squeak
and drum in the neighbourhood, unless a collection was made
in advance — which never succeeded. Conjurors and strong
men strayed among us, at long intervals ; but, I never saw the
donkey go up once. Even costermongers were shy of us, as a
bad job: seeming to know instinctively that the neighbourhood
ran scores with Mrs. Slaughter, Greengrocer, etc., of Great
Twig Street, and consequently didn't dare to buy a ha'porth
elsewhere: or very likely being told so by young Slaughter,
who managed the business, and was always lurking in the
Coal Department, practising Ramo Samee with three potatoes.
As to shops, we had no shops either, worth mentioning.
We had the Norwich Castle, Truman Hanbury and Bux-
ton, by J. Wigzell: a violent landlord, who was constantly eat-
ing in the bar, and constantly coming out with his mouth
full and his hat on, to stop his amiable daughter from giving
more credit; and we had Slaughter's; and we had a jobbing
tailor's (in a kitchen), and a toy and hardbake (in a parlour),
and a Bottle Rag Bone Kitchen-stuff and Ladies' Wardrobe,
and a tobacco and weekly paper. We used to run to the
doors and windows to look at a cab, it was such a rare sight ;
the boys (we had no end of boys, but where is there any end
of boys ? ) used to Fly the garter in the middle of the road ;
and if ever a man might have thought a neighbourhood was
settled down until it dropped to pieces, a man might have
thought ours was.
What made the fact quite the reverse, and totally changed
the neighbourhood? I have known a neighbourhood changed,
by many causes, for a time. I have known a miscellaneous
vocal concert every evening, do it ; I have known a mechanical
waxwork with a drum and organ, do it ; I have known a Zion
Chapel do it; I have known a firework-maker's do it; or a
murder, or a tallow-melter's. But, in such cases, the neigh-
bourhood has mostly got round again, after a time, to its
AN UNSETTLED NEIGHBOURHOOD 453
former character. I ask, what changed our neighbourhood
altogether and for ever? I don't mean what knocked down
rows of houses, took the whole of Little Twig Street into one
immense hotel, substituted endless cab-ranks for Fly the
garter, and shook us all day long to our foundations with
waggons of heavy goods; but, what put the neighbourhood
off its head, and wrought it to that feverish pitch, that it has
ever since been unable to settle down to any one thing, and
will never settle down again? THE RAILROAD has done it all.
That the Railway Terminus springing up in the midst of
the neighbourhood should make what I may call a physical
change in it, was to be expected. That people who had not
sufficient beds for themselves, should immediately begin offer-
ing to let beds to the travelling public, was to be expected.
That coffee-pots, stale muffins, and egg-cups, should fly into
parlour windows like tricks in a pantomime, and that every-
body should write up Good Accommodation for Railway
Travellers, was to be expected. Even that Miss Frowze
should open a cigar-shop, with a what 's-his-name that the
Brahmins smoke, in the middle of the window, and a thing out-
side like a Canoe stood on end, with a familiar invitation
underneath it, to 'Take a light,' might have been expected. I
don't wonder at house-fronts being broken out into shops,
and particularly into Railway Dining Rooms, with powdered
haunches of mutton, powdered cauliflowers, and great flat
bunches of rhubard, in the window. I don't complain of three
eight-roomed houses out of every four taking upon them-
selves to set up as Private Hotels, and putting themselves, as
such, into Bradshaw, with a charge of so much a day for bed
and breakfast, including boot-cleaning and attendance, and so
much extra for a private sitting-room — though where the
private sitting-rooms can be, in such an establishment, I leave
you to judge. I don't make it any ground of objection to
Mrs. Minderson (who is a most excellent widow woman with a
young family) that, in exhibiting one empty soup-tureen
with the cover on, she appears to have satisfied her mind that
she is fully provisioned as 'The Railway Larder.' I don't
point it out as a public evil that all the boys who are left in
the neighbourhood, tout to carry carpet-bags. The Railway
454 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Ham, Beef, and German Sausage Warehouse, I was prepared
for. The Railway Pie Shop, I have purchased pastry from.
The Railway Hat and Travelling Cap Depot, I knew to be
an establishment which in the nature of things must come.
The Railway Hair-cutting Saloon, I have been operated upon
in ; the Railway Ironmongery, Nail and Tool Warehouse ; the
Railway Bakery ; the Railway Oyster Rooms and General Shell
Fish Shop; the Railway Medical Hall; and the Railway
Hosiery and Travelling Outfitting Establishment; all these I
don't complain of. In the same way, I know that the cabmen
must and will have beer-shops, on the cellar-flaps of which they
can smoke their pipes among the waterman's buckets, and
dance the double shuffle. The railway porters must also have
their houses of call ; and at such places of refreshment I am
prepared to find the Railway Double Stout at a gigantic three-
pence in your own jugs. I don't complain of this; neither
do I complain of J. Wigzell having absorbed two houses
on each side of him into The Railway Hotel (late Norwich
Castle), and setting up an illuminated clock, and a vane at
the top of a pole like a little golden Locomotive, But what
I do complain of, and what I am distressed at, is, the state
of mind — the moral condition — into which the neighbourhood
has got. It is unsettled, dissipated, wandering (I believe
nonradic is the crack word for that sort of thing just at pres-
ent), and don't know its own mind for an hour.
I have seen various causes of demoralisation learnedly
pointed out in reports and speeches, and charges to grand
juries ; but, the most demoralising thing / know, is Luggage.
I have come to the conclusion that the moment Luggage
begins to be always shooting about a neighbourhood, that
neighbourhood goes out of its mind. Everybody wants to
be off somewhere. Everybody does everything in a hurry.
Everybody has the strangest ideas of its being vaguely his or
her business to go 'down the line.' If any Fast-train could
take it, I believe the whole neighbourhood of which I write:
bricks, stones, timber, ironwork, and everything else: would
set off down the line.
Why, only look at it! What with houses being pulled
down and houses being built up, is it possible to imagine a
AN UNSETTLED NEIGHBOURHOOD 455
neighbourhood less collected in its intellects? There are not
fifty houses of any sort in the whole place that know their
own mind a month. Now, a shop says, 'I '11 be a toy-shop.'
To-morrow it says, 'No I won't ; I '11 be a milliner's.' Next
week it says, 'No I won't ; I '11 be a stationer's.' Next week
it says, 'No I won't ; I '11 be a Berlin wool repository.' Take
the shop directly opposite my house. Within a year, it has
gone through all these changes, and has likewise been a
plumber's, painter's and glazier's, a tailor's, a broker's, a
school, a lecturing-hall, and a feeding-place, 'established to
supply the Railway public with a first-rate sandwich and a
sparkling glass of Crowley's Alton Ale for threepence.' I
have seen the different people enter on these various lines of
business, apparently in a sound and healthy state of mind. I
have seen them, one after another, go off their heads with
looking at the cabs rattling by, top-heavy with luggage, the
driver obscured by boxes and portmanteaus crammed between
his legs, and piled on the footboard — I say, I have seen them
with my own eyes, fired out of their wits by luggage, put up
the shutters, and set off down the line.
In the old state of the neighbourhood, if any young party
was sent to the Norwich Castle to see what o'clock it was,
the solid information would be brought back — say, for the
sake of argument, twenty minutes to twelve. The smallest
child in the neighbourhood who can tell the clock, is now con-
vinced that it hasn't time to say twenty minutes to twelve, but
comes back and jerks out, like a little Bradshaw, 'Eleven
forty.' Eleven forty!
Mentioning the Norwich Castle, reminds me of J. Wigzell.
That man is a type of the neighbourhood. He used to wear
his shirt-sleeves and his stiff drab trowsers, like any other
publican; and if he went out twice in a year, besides. going to
the Licensed Victuallers' Festival, it was as much as he did.
What is the state of that man now? His pantaloons must be
railway checks; his upper garment must be a cut-away coat,
perfectly undermined by travelling pockets; he must keep a
time-bill in his waistcoat— besides the two immense ones, UP
and Dowx, that are framed in the bar — he must have a
macintosh and a railway rug always lying ready on a chair {
456 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and he must habitually start off down the line, at five minutes'
notice. Now, I know that J. Wigzell has no business down
the line; he has no more occasion to go there than a Chinese.
The fact is, he stops in the bar until he is rendered perfectly
insane by the Luggage he sees flying up and down the street ;
then, catches up his macintosh and railway rug; goes down
the line ; gets out at a Common, two miles from a town ; eats
a dinner at the new little Railway Tavern there, in a choking
hurry ; comes back again by the next Up-train ; and feels that
he has done business !
We dream, in this said neighbourhood, of carpet-bags and
packages. How can we help it? All night long, when pas-
senger trains are flat, the Goods trains come in, banging and
whanging over the turning-plates at the station like the siege
of Sebastopol. Then, the mails come in ; then, the mail-carts
come out ; then, the cabs set in for the early parliamentary ;
then, we are in for it through the rest of the day. Now, I
don't complain of the whistle, I say nothing of the smoke and
steam, I have got used to the red-hot burning smell from the
Breaks which I thought for the first twelve-month was my
own house on fire, and going to burst out ; but, my ground of
offence is the moral inoculation of the neighbourhood. I am
convinced that there is some mysterious sympathy between
my hat on my head, and all the hats in hat-boxes that are
always going down the line. My shirts and stockings put
away in a chest of drawers, want to join the multitude of
shirts and stockings that are always rushing everywhere, Ex-
press, at the rate of forty mile an hour. The trucks that
clatter with such luggage, full trot, up and down the plat-
form, tear into our spirits, and hurry us, and we can't be easy.
In a word, the Railway Terminus Works themselves are a
picture of our moral state. They look confused and dissi-
pated, with an air as if they were always up all night, and
always giddy. Here, is a vast shed that was not here yester-
day, and that may be pulled down to-morrow; thero, a wall
that is run up until some other building is ready ; there, an
open piece of ground, which is a quagmire in the middle,
bounded on all four sides by a wilderness of houses, pulled
down, shored up, broken-headed, crippled, on crutches,
REFLECTIONS OF A LORD MAYOR 457
knocked about and mangled in all sorts of ways, and billed
with fragments of all kinds of ideas. We are, mind and
body, an unsettled neighbourhood. We are demoralised by
the contemplation of luggage in perpetual motion. My con-
viction is, that you have only to circulate luggage enough —
it is a mere question of quantity — through a Quakers' Meet-
ing, and every broad-brimmed hat and slate-coloured bonnet
there, will disperse to the four winds at the highest possible
existing rate of locomotion.
REFLECTIONS OF A LORD MAYOR
[NOVEMBER 18, 1854]
'I HAVE been told,' said the Lord Mayor of London, left alone
in his dressing-room after a state occasion, and proceeding
to divest himself of the very large chain the Lord Mayor of
London wears about his neck, according to the manner of the
President of the Royal Academy of Arts, and the watermen
of the principal hackney-coach stands: 'I say, I have been
told,' repeated the Lord Mayor, glancing at himself in the
glass, 'rather frequently now, in contemporary history, that I
am a Humbug.'
No matter what particular Lord Mayor of London thus
delivered himself. Any modern Lord Mayor of London may
have recalled, with the fidelity here quoted, the homage widely
offered to his position.
'I have been told so,' continued the Lord Mayor of Lon-
don, who was in the habit of practising oratory when alone, as
Demosthenes did, and with the somewhat similar object of cor-
recting a curious impediment in his speech, which always
thrust the letter H upon him when he had no business with
it, and always took it away from him when it was indispens-
able; 'I have been told so,' pursued the Lord Mayor, 'on the
ground that the privileges, dues, levies, and other exactions of
my government, are relics of ages in all respects unlike the
present ; when the manners and customs of the people were
different, when commerce was differently understood and prac-
458 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
tised, when the necessities and requirements of this enormous
metropolis were as unlike what they are now, as this enormous
metropolis itself on the map of Queen Victoria's time is unlike
the scarcely recognisable little mustard-seed displayed as Lon-
don on the map of Queen Elizabeth's time. I have been told
so, on the ground that whereas my office was a respectable
reality when the little city in which I hold my state was actu-
ally London, and its citizens were the London people, it is
a swaggering sham when the little city's inhabitants are not
a twelfth part of the metropolitan population, and when that
little city's extent is not a tenth part of the metropolitan sur-
face. These, I am informed, are a short summary of the
reasons why the London citizens who stand foremost as to
the magnitude of their mercantile dealings and the grasp of
their intelligence, always fly from the assumption of my blush-
ing honours ; and why formally constituted Commissions have
admitted, not without some reluctance, that I am — officially,'
said the Lord Mayor twice — 'officially — a most absurd
creature, and, in point of fact, the Humbug already men-
tioned.'
The Lord Mayor of London having thus summed up,
polished his gold chain with his sleeve, laid it down on the
dressing-table, put on a flannel gown, took a chair before the
glass, and proceeded to address himself in the following neat
and appropriate terms :
'Now, my Lord,' said the Lord Mayor of London ; and at
the word he bowed, and smiled obsequiously ; 'you are well
aware that there is no foundation whatever for these envious
disparagements. They are the shadows of the light of Great-
ness.' (The Lord Mayor stopped and made a note of this
sentiment, as available after dinner some day.) 'On what
evidence will you receive your true position? On the City
Recorder's? On the City Remembrancer's? On the City
Chamberlain's? On the Court of Common Council's? On
the Swordbearer's ? On the Toastmaster's ? These are good
witnesses, I believe, and they will bear testimony at any time
to your being a solid dignitary, to your office being one of
the highest aspirations of man, one of the brightest crowns of
REFLECTIONS OF A LORD MAYOR 450
merib, one of the noblest objects of earthly ambition. But,
my Lord Mayor' ; here the Lord Mayor smiled at himself and
bowed again ; 'is it from the City only, that you get thest
tributes to the virtues of your office, and the empty wickedness
of the Commission that would dethrone you? I think not. I
think you may inquire East, West, North, and South — par-
ticularly West,' said the Lord Mayor, who was a courtly per-
sonage— 'particularly West, among my friends of the aristoc-
racy— and still find that the Lord Mayor of London is the
brightest jewel (next to Mercy) in the British crown, and the
apple of the United Kingdom's eye.
'Who,' said the Lord Mayor, crossing his knees, and argu-
ing the point, with the aid of his forefinger, at himself in the
glass, 'who is to be believed? Is it the superior classes (my
very excellent and dear friends) that are to be believed, or
is it Commissions and writers in newspapers? The reply of
course is, the superior classes. Why then,' said the Lord
Mayor, 'let us consider what my beloved and honoured friends
the members of the superior classes, say.
'We will begin,' said the Lord Mayor, 'with my highly
eminent and respected friends — my revered brothers, if they
will allow me to call them so — the Cabinet Ministers. What
does a cabinet minister say when he comes to dine with me?
He gets up and tells the company that all the honours of
official life are nothing comparable to the honour of coming
and dining with the Lord Mayor. He gives them to under-
stand that, in all his doubts, his mind instinctively reverts to
the Lord Mayor for counsel; that in all his many triumphsv
he looks to the Lord Mayor for his culminating moral sup-
port ; that in all his few defeats, he looks to the Lord Mayor
for lasting consolation. He signifies that, if the Lord Mayor
only approves of his political career, he is happy ; that if the
Lord Mayor disapproves, he is miserable. His respect f 0? the
office is perpetually augmenting. He has had the honour of
enjoying the munificent hospitality of other Lord Mayors, but
he never knew such a Lord Mayor as this Lord Mayor, or
such a Lord Mayor's dinner as this dinner. With much more
to the same effect. And I believe,' said the Lord Mayor of
460 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
London, smiling obsequiously, 'that my noble and right hon-
ourable friends the Cabinet Ministers never make a fool of
any one?
'Take,' said the Lord Mayor of London, 'next, my highly
decorated friends, the Representatives of Foreign Courts.
They assure the guests, in the politest manner, that when they
inform their respective governments that they have had the
honour of dining with the Lord Mayor, their respective
governments will hardly know what to make of themselves,
they will feel so exalted by the distinction. And I hope,' said
the Lord Mayor, smiling obsequiously, 'that their Excellencies
my diplomatic friends, usually say what they mean ?
'What sentiments do the Army and Navy express when they
come and dine at the Guildhall or Mansion House? They
don't exactly tell the company that our brave soldiers and our
hardy seamen rush to conquest, stimulating one another with
the great national watchword, "The Lord Mayor!" but they
almost go that length. They intimate that the courage of
our national defenders would be dreadfully damped if there
was no Lord Mayor ; that Nelson and Wellington always had
the Lord Mayor in their minds (as no doubt they had) in con-
ducting their most brilliant exploits ; and that they always
looked forward to the Lord Mayor (as no doubt they did)
for their highest rewards. And I think,' said the Lord
Mayor, smiling obsequiously, 'that my honourable and gallant
friends, the field-marshals and admirals of this glorious coun-
try, are not the men to bandy compliments?
'My eminently reverend friends the Archbishops and
Bishops, ihey are not idle talkers,' said the Lord Mayor.
'Yet, when they do me the honour to take no thought (as I
may say) what they shall eat or what they shall drink, but with
the greatest urbanity to eat and drink (I am proud to think)
up to the full amount of three pound three per head, they are
not behind-hand with the rest. They perceive in the Lord
Mayor, a pillar of the great fabric of church and state ; they
know that the Lord Mayor is necessary to true Religion;
they are, in a general way, fully impressed with the conviction
that the Lord Mayor is an Institution not to be touched with-
out danger to orthodox piety. Yet, if I am not deceived,'
REFLECTIONS OF A LORD MAYOR 461
said the Lord Mayor, smiling obsequiously, 'my pastoral and
personal friends, the archbishops and bishops, are to be be-
lieved upon their affirmation?
'My elevated and learned friends, the Judges!' cried the
Lord Mayor, in a tone of enthusiasm. 'When I ask the
judges to dinner, they are not found to encourage the recom-
mendations of corrupt Commissions. On the contrary, I infer
from their speeches that they are at a loss to understand how
Law or Equity could ever be administered in this country, if
the Lord Mayor was reduced. I understand from them, that
it is, somehow, the Lord Mayor who keeps the very judges
themselves straight ; that if there was no Lord Mayor, they
would begin to go crooked ; that if they didn't dine with the
Lord Mayor at least once a year, they couldn't answer for
their not taking bribes, or doing something of that sort. And
it is a general opinion, I imagine,' said the Lord Mayor, smil-
ing obsequiously, 'that my judicial friends the judges, know
how to sum up a case?
'Likewise my honourable and legislative friends the Mem-
bers of the House of Commons — and my noble and deliberative
friends, the Members of the House of Lords — and my learned
and forensic friends of the liberal profession of the Bar!'
cried the Lord Mayor. 'They are all convinced (when they
come to dinner) that without the Lord Mayor, the whole Lord
Mayor, and nothing but the Lord Mayor, there would ensue
what I may call a national smash. They are all agreed that
society is a kind of barrel, formed of a number of staves,
with a very few hoops to keep them together; and that the
Lord Mayor of London is such a strong hoop, that if he was
taken off, the staves would fly asunder, and the barrel would
burst. This is very gratifying, this is very imporant, this is
very dignifying, this is very true. I am proud of this pro-
found conviction. For, I believe,' said the Lord Mayor, smil-
ing obsequiously, 'that this distinguished agglomeration of
my eloquent and flowery friends, is capable of making
speeches ?
'Then you see, my Lord,' pursued the Lord Mayor, resum-
ing the argument with his looking-glass, after a short pause
of pride in his illustrious circle of acquaintance, which caused
462 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
him to swell considerably, 'it comes to this. Do these various
distinguished persons come into the city annually, as a matter
of course, to make certain routine speeches over you, without
in the least caring or considering what they mean — just as the
boys do, in the same month, over Guy Fawkes; or do they
come really and truly to uphold you. In the former case, you
would be placed in the unpleasant predicament of knowing for
certain that they laugh at you when they go home ; in the
latter case, you would have the happiness of being sure that
the Commission which declares you to be the — in point of
fact,' said the Lord Mayor, with a lingering natural reluc-
tance, 'the Humbug already mentioned — is a piece of impo-
tent falsehood and malice.
'Which you know it to be,' said the Lord Mayor, rising
firmly. 'Which you know it to be ! Your honoured and
revered friends of the upper classes, rally round you'; (the
Lord Mayor made a note of the neat expression, rallying
round, as available for various public occasions); 'and you
see them, and you hear them, and seeing and hearing are be-
lieving, or nothing is. Further, you are bound as their de-
voted servant to believe them, or you fall into the admission
that public functionaries have got into a way of pumping out
floods of conventional words without any meaning and without
any sincerity — a way not likely to be reserved for Lord
Mayors only, and a very bad way for the whole community.'
So, the Lord Mayor of London went to bed, and dreamed
of being made a Baronet.
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS
I
[DECEMBER 2, 1854]
DR. RAE may be considered to have established, by the mute
but solemn testimony of the relics he has brought home, that
Sir John Franklin and his party are no more.1 But, there is
?-Sir John Franklin's Third Arctic Expedition started on 24th May
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 463
one passage in his melancholy report, some examination into
the probabilities and improbabilities of which, we hope will
tend to the consolation of those who take the nearest and dear-
est interest in the fate of that unfortunate expedition, by lead-
ing to the conclusion that there is no reason whatever to be-
lieve, that any of its members prolonged their existence by the
dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead com-
panions. Quite apart from the very loose and unreliable
nature of the Esquimaux representations (on which it would
be necessary to receive with great caution, even the common-
est and most natural occurrence), we believe we shall show,
that close analogy and the mass of experience are decidedly
against the reception of any such statement, and that it is in
the highest degree improbable that such men as the officers and
crews of the two lost ships would, or could, in any extremity
of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible
means.
Before proceeding to the discussion, we will premise that we
find no fault with Dr. Rae, and that we thoroughly acquit
him of any trace of blame. He has himself openly explained,
that his duty demanded that he should make a faithful report,
to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Admiralty, of every cir-
cumstance stated to him ; that he did so, as he was bound to
do, without any reservation ; and that his report was made
public by the Admiralty : not by him. It is quite clear that if
it were an ill-considered proceeding to disseminate this painful
idea on the worst of evidence, Dr. Rae is not responsible for
it. It is not material to the question that Dr. Rae believes in
the alleged cannibalism; he does so, merely 'on the substance
of information obtained at various times and various sources,'
which is before us all. At the same time, we will most readily
concede that he has all the rights to defend his opinion which
his high reputation as a skilful and intrepid traveller of great
experience in the Arctic Regions — combined with his manly,
conscientious, and modest personal character — can possibly
invest him with. Of the propriety of his immediate return to
1845, and was never heard of again after July of the same year. Several
voyages of discovery were made, and Dr. Rae, who twice accompanied
search parties, returned in 1854 and reported the results of his efforts.
464 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
England with the intelligence he had got together, we are
fully convinced. As a man of sense and humanity, he per-
ceived that the first and greatest account, to which it could be
turned, was, the prevention of the useless hazard of valuable
lives; and no one could better know in how much hazard all
lives are placed that follow Franklin's track, than he who
made eight visits to the Arctic shores. With these remarks we
can release Dr. Rae from this inquiry, proud of him as an
Englishman, and happy in his safe return home to well-earned
rest.
The following is the passage in the report to which we in-
vite attention: 'Some of the bodies had been buried (prob-
ably those of the first victims of famine) ; some were in a tent
or tents; others under the boat, which had been turned over
to form a shelter ; and several lay scattered about in different
directions. Of those found on the island, one was supposed to
have been an officer, as he had a telescope strapped over his
shoulders, and his double-barrelled gun lay underneath him.
From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the con-
tents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen
had been driven to the last resource — cannibalism — as a means
of prolonging existence. . . . None of the Esquimaux
with whom I conversed had seen the "whites," nor had they
ever been at the place where the bodies were found, but had
their information from those who had been there, and who had
seen the party when travelling.'
We have stated our belief that the extreme improbability of
this inference as to the last resource, can be rested, first on
close analogy, and secondly, on broad general grounds, quite
apart from the improbabilities and incoherencies of the Esqui-
maux evidence: which is itself given, at the very best, at
second-hand. More than this, we presume it to have been
given at second-hand through an interpreter; and he was, in
all probability, imperfectly acquainted with the language he
translated to the white man. We believe that few (if any)
Esquimaux tribes speak one common dialect; and Franklin's
own experience of his interpreters in his former voyage was,
that they and the Esquimaux they encountered understood
each other 'tolerably' — an expression which he frequently uses
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 465
in his book, with the evident intention of showing that their
communication was not altogether satisfactory. But, even
making the very large admission that Dr. Rae's interpreter
perfectly understood what he was told, there yet remains the
question whether he could render it into language of corres-
ponding weight and value. We recommend any reader who
does not perceive the difficulty of doing so and the skill re-
quired, even when a copious and elegant European language
is in question, to turn to the accounts of the trial of Queen
Caroline, and to observe the constant discussions that arose —
sometimes, very important — in reference to the worth, in Eng-
lish, of words used by the Italian witnesses. There still re-
mains another consideration, and a grave one, which is, that
ninety-nine interpreters out of a hundred, whether savage,
half-savage, or wholly civilised, interpreting to a person of
superior station and attainments, will be under a strong temp-
tation to exaggerate. This temptation will always be
strongest, precisely where the person interpreted to is seen to
be the most excited and impressed by what he hears ; for, in
proportion as he is moved, the interpreter's importance is in-
creased. We have ourself had an opportunity of inquiring
whether any part of this awful information, the unsatisfactory
result of 'various times and various sources,' was conveyed by
gestures. It was so, and the gesture described to us as often
repeated — that of the informant setting his mouth to his own
arm — would quite as well describe a man having opened one of
his veins, and drunk of the stream that flowed from it. If it
be inferred that the officer who lay upon his double-barrelled
gun, defended his life to the last against ravenous seamen,
under the boat or elsewhere, and that he died in so doing, how
came his body to be found? That was not eaten, or even
mutilated, according to the description. Neither were the
bodies, buried in the frozen earth, disturbed; and is it not
likely that if any bodies were resorted to as food, those the
most removed from recent life and companionship would have
been the first? Was there any fuel in that desolate place for
cooking 'the contents of the kettles' ? If none, would the little
flame of the spirit-lamp the travellers may hare had with
them, have sufficed for such a purpose? If not, would the
466
kettles have been defiled for that purpose at all? 'Some of the
corpses,' Dr. Rae add?, in a letter to the Times, 'had been sadly
mutilated, and had been stripped by those who had the misery
to survive them, and who were found wrapped in two or three
suits of clothes.' Had there been no bears thereabout, to
mutilate those bodies; no wolves, no foxes? Most probably
the scurvy, known to be the dreadfullest scourge of Euro-
peans in those latitudes, broke out among the party. Virulent
as it would inevitably be under such circumstances, it would
of itself cause dreadful disfigurement — woeful mutilation —
but, more than that, it would not only soon annihilate the
desire to eat (especially to eat flesh of any kind), but would
annihilate the power. Lastly, no man can, with any show of
reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin's
gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux
themselves. It is impossible to form an estimate of the char-
acter of any race of savages, from their deferential behaviour
to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been
made again and again ; and the moment the white man has
appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage,
the savage has changed and sprung upon him. There are
pious persons who, in their practice, with a strange inconsist-
ency, claim for every child born to civilisation all innate
depravity, and for every savage born to the woods and wilds
all innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart
covetous, treacherous, and cruel ; and we have yet to learn what
knowledge the white man — lost, houseless, shipless, apparently
forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen,
helpless, and dying — has of the gentleness of Esquimaux
nature.
Leaving, as we purposed, this part of the subject with a
glance, let us put a supposititious case.
If a little band of British naval officers, educated and
trained exactly like the officers of this ill-fated expedition, had,
on a former occasion, in command of a party of men vastly
inferior to the crews of these two ships, penetrated to the same
regions, and been exposed to the rigours of the same climate ;
if they had undergone such fatigue, exposure, and disaster,
that scarcely power remained to them to crawl, and they tot-
467
tered and fell many times in a journey of a few yards; if they
could not bear the contemplation of their 'filth and wretched-
ness, each other's emaciated figures, ghastly countenances,
dilated eyeballs, and sepulchral voices'; if they had eaten
their shoes, such outer clothes as they could part with and not
perish of cold, the scraps of acrid marrow yet remaining in the
dried and whitened spines of dead wolves ; if they had wasted
away to skeletons, on such fare, and on bits of putrid skin, and
bits of hides and the covers of guns, and pounded bones; if
they had passed through all the pangs of famine, had reached
that point of starvation where there is little or no pain left,
and had descended so far into the valley of the shadow of
Death, that they lay down side by side, calmly and even cheer-
fully awaiting their release from this world; if they had suf-
fered such dire extremity, and yet lay where the bodies of their
dead companions lay unburied, within a few paces of them ;
and yet never dreamed at the last gasp of resorting to this
said 'last resource' ; would it not be strong presumptive
evidence against an incoherent Esquimaux story, collected at
'various times' as it wandered from 'various sources'? But, if
the leader of that party were the leader of this very party too ;
if Franklin himself had undergone those dreadful trials, and
had been restored to health and strength, and had been — not
for days and months alone, but years — the Chief of this very
expedition, infusing into it, as such a man necessarily must,
the force of his character and discipline, patience and forti-
tude; would there not be a still greater and stronger moral
improbability to set against the wild tales of a herd of
savages ?
Now, this was Franklin's case. He had passed through the
ordeal we have described. He was the Chief of that expedi-
tion, and he was the Chief of this. In this, he commanded a
body of picked English seamen of the first class ; in that, he
and his three officers had but one English seaman to rely on;
the rest of the men being Canadian voyagers and Indians.
His Xarrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in
1819—22, is one of the most explicit and enthralling in the
whole literature of Voyage and Travel. The facts are acted
and suffered before the reader's eyes, in the descriptions of
468 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Franklin, Richardson, and Back: three of the greatest names
in the history of heroic endurance.
See how they gradually sink into the depths of misery.
'I was reduced,' says Franklin, long before the worst came,
'almost to skin and bone, and, like the rest of the party, suf-
fered from degrees of cold that would have been disregarded
whilst in health and vigour.' 'I set out with the intention of
going to Saint Germain, to hasten his operations (making a
canoe), but though he was only three quarters of a mile dis-
tant, I spent three hours in a vain attempt to reach him, my
strength being unequal to the labour of wading through the
deep snow ; and I returned quite exhausted, and much" shaken
by the numerous falls I had got. My associates were all in the
same debilitated state. The voyagers were somewhat stronger
than ourselves, but more indisposed to exertion, on account of
their despondency. The sensation of hunger was no longer
felt by any of us, yet we were scarcely able to converse upon
any other subject than the pleasures of eating.' 'We had a
small quantity of this weed (tripe de roche, and always the
cause of miserable illness to some of them) in the evening, and
the rest of our supper was made up of scraps of roasted
leather. The distance walked to-day was six miles.' 'Pre-
vious to setting out, the whole party ate the remains of their
old shoes, and whatever scraps of leather they had, to
strengthen their stomachs for the fatigue of the day's jour-
ney.' 'Not being able to find any tripe de roche, we drank
an infusion of the Labrador tea-plant, and ate a few morsels
of burnt leather for supper.' 'We were unable to raise the
tent, and found its weight too great to carry it on ; we there-
fore cut it up, and took a part of the canvas for a cover.'
Thus growing weaker and weaker every day, they reached,
at last, Fort Enterprise, a lonely and desolate hut, where
Richardson — then Dr. Richardson, now Sir John — and Hep-
burn, the English seaman, from whom they had been parted,
rejoined them. 'We were all shocked at beholding the
emaciated countenances of the Doctor and Hepburn, as they
strongly evidenced their extremely debilitated state. The
alteration in our appearance was equally distressing to them,
for, since the swellings had subsided, we were little more
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 469
than skin and bone. The Doctor particularly remarked the
sepulchral tone of our voices, which he requested us to make
more cheerful, if possible, quite unconscious that his own par-
took of the same key.' 'In the afternoon Peltier was so
much exhausted, that he sat up with difficulty, and looked
piteously ; at length he slided from his stool upon the bed, as
we supposed to sleep, and in this composed state he remained
upwards of two hours without our apprehending any danger.
We were then alarmed by hearing a rattling in his throat,
and on the Doctor's examining him he was found to be speech-
less. He died in the course of the night. Semandre sat
up the greater part of the day, and even assisted in pound-
ing some bones; but, on witnessing the melancholy state of
Peltier, he became very low, and began to complain of cold,
and stiffness of the joints. Being unable to keep up a suffi-
cient fire to warm him, we laid him down, and covered him
with several blankets. He did not, however, appear to get
better, and I deeply lament to add, he also died before day-
light. We removed the bodies of the deceased into the
opposite part of the house, but our united strength was
inadequate to the task of interring them, or even carrying
them down to the river.' 'The severe shock occasioned by
the sudden dissolution of our two companions, rendered us
very melancholy. Adam (one of the interpreters) became
low and despondent ; a change which we lamented the more,
as we perceived he had been gaining strength and spirits for
the two preceding days. I was particularly distressed by the
thought that the labour of collecting wood must now devolve
upon Dr. Richardson and Hepburn, and that my debility
would disable me from affording them any material assist-
ance ; indeed both of them most kindly urged me not to make
the attempt. I found it necessary, in their absence, to re-
main constantly near Adam and to converse with him, in order
to prevent his reflecting on our condition, and to keep up
his spirits as far as possible. I also lay by his side at
night.' 'The Doctor, and Hepburn were getting much
weaker, and the limbs of the latter were now greatly swelled.
They came into the house frequently in the course of the
day to rest themselves, and when once seated were unable to
470 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
rise without the help of one another, or of a stick. Adam
was for the most part in the same low state as yesterday, but
sometimes he surprised us by getting up and walking with
an appearance of increased strength. His looks were now
wild and ghastly, and his conversation was often incoherent.'
'I may here remark, that owing to our loss of flesh, the
hardness of the floor, from which we were only protected by
a blanket, produced soreness over the body, and especially
those parts on which the weight rested in lying ; yet to turn
ourselves for relief was a matter of toil and difficulty. How-
ever, during this period, and indeed all along after the acute
pains of hunger, which lasted but a short time, had sub-
sided, we generally enjoyed the comfort of a few hours'
sleep. The dreams which for the most part but not always
accompanied it, were usually (though not invariably) of a
pleasant character, being very often about the enjoyments of
feasting. In the daytime, we fell into the practice of con-
versing on common and light subjects, although we sometimes
discoursed, with seriousness and earnestness, on topics con-
nected with religion. We generally avoided speaking,
directly, of our present sufferings, or even of the prospect
of relief. I observed, that in proportion as our strength
decayed, our minds exhibited symptoms of weakness, evinced
by a kind of unreasonable pettishness with each other.
Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than him-
self, and more in need of advice and assistance. So trifling
a circumstance as a change of place, recommended by one as
being warmer and more comfortable, and refused by the
other from a dread of motion, frequently called forth fretful
expressions, which were no sooner uttered than atoned for,
to be repeated, perhaps, in the course of a few minutes. The
same thing often occurred when we endeavoured to assist
each other in carrying wood to the fire ; none of us were will-
ing to receive assistance, although the task was dispropor-
tioned to our strength. On one of these occasions, Hepburn
was so convinced of this waywardness, that he exclaimed,
"Dear me, if we are spared to return to England, I wonder
if we shall recover our understandings !" '
Surely it must be comforting to the relatives and friends
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 471
of Franklin and his brave companions in later dangers, now
at rest, to reflect upon this manly and touching narrative; to
consider that at the time it so affectingly describes, and all the
weaknesses which it so truthfully depicts, the bodies of the
dead lay within reach, preserved by the cold, but unmutilated ;
and to know it for an established truth, that the sufferers had
passed the bitterness of hunger and were then dying pas-
sively.
They knew the end they were approaching very well, as
Franklin's account of the arrival of their deliverance next day,
shows. 'Adam had passed a restless night, being disquieted
by gloomy apprehensions of approaching death, which we
tried in vain to dispel. He was so low in the morning as
to be scarcely able to speak. I remained in bed by his side,
to cheer him as much as possible. The Doctor and Hepburn
went to cut wood. They had hardly begun their labour,
when they were amazed at hearing the report of a musket.
They could scarcely believe that there was really any one
near, until they heard a shout, and immediately espied three
Indians close to the house. Adam and I heard the latter
noise, and I was fearful that a part of the house had fallen
upon one of my companions; a disaster which had in fact
been thought not unlikely. My alarm was only momentary.
Dr. Richardson came in to communicate the joyful intelli-
gence that relief had arrived. He and myself immediately
addressed thanksgiving to the throne of mercy for this de-
liverance, but poor Adam was in so low a state that he could
scarcely comprehend the information. When the Indians
entered, he attempted to rise, but sank down again. But for
this seasonable interposition of Providence, his existence must
have terminated in a few hours, and that of the rest probably
in not many days.'
But, in the preceding trials and privations of that expedi-
tion, there ze-«* one man, Michel, an Iroquois hunter, who did
conceive the horrible idea of subsisting on the bodies of the
stragglers, if not of even murdering the weakest with the
express design of eating them — which is pretty certain.
This man planned and executed his wolfish devices at a time
when Sir John Richardson and Hepburn were afoot with him
472 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
every day; when, though their sufferings were very great,
they had not fallen into the weakened state of mind we have
just read of; and when the mere difference between his bodily
robustness and the emaciation of the rest of the party — to
say nothing of his mysterious absences and returns — might
have engendered suspicion. Yet, so far off was the un-
natural thought of cannibalism from their minds, and from
that of Mr. Hood, another officer who accompanied them —
though they were all then suffering the pangs of hunger,
and were sinking every hour — that no suspicion of the truth
dawned upon one of them, until the same hunter shot Mr.
Hood dead as he sat by a fire. It was after the commission
of that crime, when he had become an object of horror and
distrust, and seemed to be going savagely mad, that circum-
stances began to piece themselves together in the minds of
the two survivors, suggesting a guilt so monstrously unlikely
to both of them that it had never flashed upon the thoughts
of either until they knew the wretch to be a murderer. To
be rid of his presence, and freed from the danger they at
length perceived it to be fraught with, Sir John Richardson,
nobly assuming the responsibility he would not allow a man
of commoner station to bear, shot this devil through the
head — to the infinite joy of all the generations of readers
who will honour him in his admirable narrative of that trans-
action.
The words in which Sir John Richardson mentions this
Michel, after the earth is rid of him, are extremely important
to our purpose, as almost describing the broad general
ground towards which we now approach. 'His principles, un-
supported by a belief in the divine truths of Christianity,
were unable to withstand the pressure of severe distress. His
countrymen, the Iroquois, are generally Christians, but he
was totally uninstructed, and ignorant of the duties incul-
cated by Christianity; and from his long residence in the
Indian country, seems to have imbibed, or retained, the rules
of conduct which the southern Indians prescribe to them-
selves.'
Heaven forbid that we, sheltered and fed, and considering
this question at our own warm hearth, should audaciously set
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 473
limits to any extremity of desperate distress! It is in rever-
ence for the brave and enterprising, in admiration for the
great spirits who can endure even unto the end, in love for
their names, and in tenderness for their memory, that we
think of the specks, once ardent men, 'scattered about in
different directions' on the waste of ice and snow, and plead
for their lightest ashes. Our last claim in their behalf and
honour, against the vague babble of savages, is, that the
instances in which this 'last resource' so easily received, has
been permitted to interpose between life and death, are few
and exceptional ; whereas the instances in which the sufferings
of hunger have been borne until the pain was past, are very
many. Also, and as the citadel of the position, that the bet-
ter educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, the
more reflective and religious the tone of thought, the more
gigantically improbable the 'last resource' becomes.
Beseeching the reader always to bear in mind that the lost
Arctic voyagers were carefully selected for the service, and
that each was in his condition no doubt far above the average,
we will test the Esquimaux kettle-stories by some of the most
trying and famous cases of hunger and exposure on record.
This, however, we must reserve for another and concluding
chapter next week.
II
[DECEMBER 9, 1854]
WE resume our subject of last week.
The account of the sufferings of the shipwrecked men, in
Don Juan, will rise into most minds as our topic presents
itself. It is founded (so far as such a writer as Byron may
choose to resort to facts, in aid of what he knows intuitively),
on several real cases. Bligh's undecked-boat navigation,
after the mutiny of the Bounty; and the wrecks of the Cen~
taur, the Peggy, the Pandora, the Juno, and the Thomas;
had been, among other similar narratives, attentively read by
the poet.
474 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
In Bligh's case, though the endurances of all on board
were extreme, there was no movement towards the 'last
resource.' And this, though Bligh in the memorable voyage
which showed his knowledge of navigation to be as good as
his temper was bad (which is very high praise), could only
serve out, at the best, 'about an ounce of pork to each per-
son,' and was fain to weigh the allowance of bread against
a pistol bullet, and in the most urgent need could only ad-
minister wine or rum by the teaspoonful. Though the neces-
sities of the party were so great, that when a stray bird was
caught, its blood was poured into the mouths of three of the
people who were nearest death, and 'the body, with the en-
trails, beak, and feet, was divided into eighteen shares.'
Though of a captured dolphin there was 'issued about two
ounces, including the offals, to each person' ; and though the
time came, when, in Bligh's words, 'there was a visible altera-
tion for the worse in many of the people which excited great
apprehensions in me. Extreme weakness, swelled legs, hollow
and ghastly countenances, with an apparent debility of under-
standing, seemed to me the melancholy presages of approach-
ing dissolution.'
The Centaur, man-of-war, sprung a leak at sea in very
heavy weather; was perceived, after great labour, to be fast
settling down by the head ; and was abandoned by the captain
and eleven others, in the pinnace. They were 'in a leaky
boat, with one of the gunwales stove, in nearly the middle of
the Western Ocean ; without compass, quadrant, or sail : want-
ing great-coat or cloak ; all very thinly clothed, in a gale of
wind, and with a great sea running.' They had 'one biscuit
divided into twelve morsels for breakfast, and the same for
dinner; the neck of a bottle, broke off with the cork in it,
served for a glass; and this filled with water was the allow-
ance for twenty-four hours, to each man.' This misery was
endured, without any reference whatever to the last resource,
for fifteen days : at the expiration of which time, they happily
made land. Observe the captain's words, at the height.
'Our sufferings were now as great as human strength could
bear; but, we were convinced that good spirits were a better
support than great bodily strength ; for on this day Thomas
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 475
Mathews, quartermaster, perished from hunger and cold. On
the day before, he had complained of want of strength in his
throat, as he expressed it, to swallow his morsel, and in the
night grew delirious and died without a groan.' What were
their reflections? That they could support life on the body?
4As it became next to certainty that we should all perish in
the same manner in a day or two, it was somewhat comfort-
able to reflect that dying of hunger was not so dreadful as
our imaginations had represented.'
The Pandora, frigate, was sent out to Otaheite, to bring
home for trial such of the mutineers of the Bounty as could
be found upon the island. In Endeavour Straits, on her
homeward voyage, she struck upon a reef ; was got off, by
great exertion ; but had sustained such damage, that she soon
heeled over and went down. One hundred and ten persons
escaped in the boats, and entered on 'a long and dangerous
voyage.' The daily allowance to each, was a musket-ball
weight of bread, and two small wineglasses of water. 'The
heat of the sun and reflection of the sand became intolerable,
and the quantity of salt water swallowed by the men created
the most parching thirst ; excruciating tortures were endured,
and one of the men went mad and died.' Perhaps this body
was devoured? No. 'The people at length neglected weigh-
ing their slender allowance, their mouths becoming so
parched that few attempted to eat ; and what was not claimed,
was returned to the general stock.' They were a fine crew
(but not so fine as Franklin's), and in a state of high dis-
cipline. Only this one death occurred, and all the rest were
saved.
The Juno, a rotten and unseaworthy ship, sailed from Ran-
goon for Madras, with a cargo of teak-wood. She had been
out three weeks, and had already struck upon a sandbank
and sprung a leak, which the crew imperfectly stopped, when
she became a wreck in a tremendous storm. The second mate
and others, including the captain's wife, climbed into the
mizen-top, and made themselves fast to the rigging. The
second mate is the narrator of their distresses, and opens them
with this remarkable avowal. 'We saw that we might remain
on the wreck till carried off by famine, the most frightful
476 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
shape in which death could appear to us. I confess it was
my intention, as well as that of the rest, to prolong my
existence by the only means that seemed likely to occur —
eating the flesh of any whose life might terminate before my
own. But this idea we did not communicate, or even hint to
each other, until long afterwards ; except once, that the gun-
ner, a Roman Catholic, asked me if I thought there would be
a sin in having recourse to such an expedient.' Now, it might
reasonably be supposed, with this beginning, that the wreck
of the Juno furnishes some awful instances of the 'last
resource' of the Esquimaux stories. Not one. But, perhaps
no unhappy creature died, in this mizen-top where the second
mate was? Half a dozen, at least, died there; and the body
of one Lascar getting entangled in the rigging, so that the
survivors in their great weakness could not for some time
release it and throw it overboard — which was their manner of
disposing of the other bodies — hung there, for two or three
days. It is worthy of all attention, that as the mate grew
weaker, the terrible phantom which had been in his mind at
first (as it might present itself to the mind of any other per-
son, not actually in the extremity imagined), grew paler and
more remote. At first, he felt sullen and irritable; on the
night of the fourth day he had a refreshing sleep, dreamed
of his father, a country clergyman, thought that he was
administering the Sacrament to him, and drew the cup away
when he stretched out his hand to take it. He chewed can-
vas, lead, any substance he could find — would have eaten his
shoes, early in his misery, but that he wore none. And yet he
says, and at an advanced stage of his story too, 'After all
that I suffered, I believe it fell short of the idea I had formed
of what would probably be the natural consequence of such a
situation as that to which we were reduced. I had read or
heard that no person could live without food, beyond a few
days; and when several had elapsed, I was astonished at my
having existed so long, and concluded that every succeeding
day must be the last. I expected, as the agonies of death
approached, that we should be tearing the flesh from each
other's bones.' Later still, he adds : 'I can give very little
account of the rest of the time. The sensation of hunger
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 477
was lost in that of weakness ; and when I could get a supply
of fresh water I was comparatively easy.' When land was
at last descried, he had become too indifferent to raise his
head to look at it, and continued lying in a dull and drowsy
state, much as Adam the interpreter lay, with Franklin at his
side.
The Peggy was an American sloop, sailing home from the
Azores to New York. She encountered great distress of
weather, ran short of provision, and at length had no food on
board, and no water, 'except about two gallons which remained
dirty at the bottom of a cask.' The crew ate a cat they had
on board, the leather from the pumps, their buttons and their
shoes, the candles and the oil. Then, they went aft, and
down into the captain's cabin, and said they wanted him to
see lots fairly drawn who should be killed to feed the rest.
The captain refusing with horror, they went forward again,
contrived to make the lot fall on a negro whom they had on
board, shot him, fried a part of him for supper, and pickled
the rest, with the exception of the head and fingers which
they threw overboard. The greediest man among them, dy-
ing raving mad on the third day after this event, they threw
his body into the sea — it would seem because they feared to
derive a contagion of madness from it, if they ate it. Nine
days having elapsed in all since the negro's death, and they
being without food again, they went below once more and
repeated their proposal to the captain (who lay weak and ill
in his cot, having been unable to endure the mere thought
of touching the negro's remains), that he should see lots fairly
drawn. As he had no security but that they would manage,
if he still refused, that the lot should fall on him, he con-
sented. It fell on a foremast-man, who was the favourite of
the whole ship. He was quite willing to die, and chose the
man who shot the negro, to be his executioner. While he was
yet living, the cook made a fire in the galley ; but, they re-
solved, when all was ready for his death, that the fire should
be put out again, and that the doomed foremast-man should
live until an hour before noon next day; after which they
went once more into the captain's cabin, and begged him
to read prayers, with supplications that a sail might heave in
478 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
sight before the appointed time. A sail was seen at about
eight o'clock next morning, and they were taken off the
wreck.
Is there any circumstance in this case to separate it from
the others already described, and from the case of the lost
Arctic voyagers? Let the reader judge. The ship was laden
with wine and brandy. The crew were incessantly drunk
from the first hour of their calamities falling upon them.
They were not sober, even at the moment when they proposed
the drawing of lots. They were with difficulty restrained from
making themselves wildly intoxicated while the strange sail
bore down to their rescue. And the mate, who should have
been the exemplar and preserver of discipline, was so drunk
after all, that he had no idea whatever of anything that had
happened, and was rolled into the boat which saved his life.
In the case of the Thomas, the surgeon bled the man to
death on whom the lot fell, and his remains were eaten
ravenously. The details of this shipwreck are not within our
reach ; but, we confidently assume the crew to have been of
an inferior class.
The useful and accomplished Sir John Barrow, remarking
that it is but too well established 'that men in extreme cases
have destroyed each other for the sake of appeasing hunger,'
instances the English ship the Nautilus and the French ship
the Medusa. Let us look into the circumstances of these two
shipwrecks.
The Nautilus, sloop of war, bound for England with
despatches from the Dardanelles, struck, one dark and stormy
January night, on a coral rock in the Mediterranean, and
soon broke up. A number of the crew got upon the rock,
which scarcely rose above the water, and was less than four
hundred yards long, and not more than two hundred broad.
On the fourth day — they having been in the meantime hailed
by some of their comrades who had got into a small whale-
boat which was hanging over the ship's quarter when she
struck; and also knowing that boat to have made for some
fishermen not far off — these shipwrecked people ate the body
of a young man who had died some hours before: notwith-
standing that Sir John Barrow's words would rather imply
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 479
that they killed some unfortunate person for the purpose.
Now, surely after what we have just seen of the extent of
human endurance under similar circumstances, we know this
to be an exceptional and uncommon case. It may likewise be
argued that few of the people on the rock can have eaten
of this fearful food; for, the survivors were fifty in number,
and were not taken off until the sixth day and the eating of no
other body is mentioned, though many persons died.
We come then, to the wreck of the Medusa, of which there
is a lengthened French account by two surviving members of
the crew, which was very indifferently translated into English
some five-and-thirty years ago. She sailed from France for
Senegal, in company with three other vessels, and had about
two hundred and forty souls on board, including a number
of soldiers. She got among shoals and stranded, a fortnight
after her departure from Aix Roads. After scenes of tre-
mendous confusion and dismay, the people at length took to
the boats, and to a raft made of topmasts, yards, and other
stout spars, strongly lashed together. One hundred and fifty
mortals were crammed together on the raft, of whom only fif-
teen remained to be saved at the end of thirteen days. The
raft has become the ship, and may always be understood to be
meant when the wreck of the Medusa is in question.
Upon this raft, every conceivable and inconceivable horror,
possible under the circumstances, took place. It was shame-
fully deserted by the boats (though the land was within fifteen
leagues at that time), and it was so deep in the water that those
who clung to it, fore and aft, were always immersed in the
sea to their middles, and it was only out of the water amid-
ships. It had a pole for a mast, on which the top-gallant sail
of the Medusa was hoisted. It rocked and rolled violently
with every wave, so that even in the dense crowd it was impos-
sible to stand without holding on. Within the first few hours,
people were washed off by dozens, flung themselves into the sea,
were stifled in the press, and, getting entangled among the
spars, rolled lifeless to and fro under foot. There was a cask
of wine upon it which was secretly broached by the soldiers and
sailors, who drank themselves so mad, that they resolved to cut
the cords asunder, and send the whole living freight to perdi-
480 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
tion. They were headed by 'an Asiatic, and soldier in a
colonial regiment : of a colossal stature, with short curled hair,
an extremely large nose, an enormous mouth, a sallow com-
plexion, and a hideous air.' Him, an officer cast into the sea ;
upon which, his comrades made a charge at the officer, threw
him into the sea, and, on his being recovered by their op-
ponents who launched a barrel to him, tried to cut out his eyes
with a penknife. Hereupon, an incessant and infernal com-
bat was fought between the two parties, with sabres, knives,
bayonets, nails, and teeth, until the rebels were thinned and
cowed, and they were all ferociously wild together. On the
third day, they 'fell upon the dead bodies with which the raft
was covered, and cut off pieces, which some instantly devoured.
Many did not touch them ; almost all the officers were of this
number.' On the fourth 'we dressed some fish (they had fire
on the raft) which we devoured with extreme avidity ; but, our
hunger was so great, and our portion of fish so small, that we
added to it some human flesh, which dressing rendered less dis-
gusting; it was this which the officers touched for the first
time. From this day we continued to use it ; but we could
not dress it any more, as we were entirely deprived of the
means,' through the accidental extinction of their fire, and
their having no materials to kindle another. Before the
fourth night, the raving mutineers rose again, and were cut
down and thrown overboard until only thirty people remained
alive upon the raft. On the seventh day, there were only
twenty-seven; and twelve of these, being spent and ill, were
every one cast into the sea by the remainder, who then, in an
access of repentance, threw the weapons away too, all but one
sabre. After that 'the soldiers and sailors' were eager to de-
vour a butterfly which was seen fluttering on the mast ; after
that, some of them began to tell the stories of their lives ; and
thus, with grim joking, and raging thirst and reckless bath-
ing among the sharks which had now begun to follow the
raft, and general delirium and fever, they were picked up by
a ship : to the number, and after the term of exposure, already
mentioned.
Are there any circumstances in this frightful case, to ac-
count for its peculiar horrors? Again, the reader shall judge.
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 481
No discipline worthy of the name had been observed aboard the
Medusa from the minute of her weighing anchor. The cap-
tain had inexplicably delegated his authority 'to a man who
did not belong to the staff. He was an ex-officer of the ma-
rine, who had just left an English prison, where he had been
for ten years.' This man held the ship's course against the
protest of the officers, who warned him what would come of it.
The work of the ship had been so ill done, that even the com-
mon manoeuvres necessary to the saving of a boy who fell
overboard, had been bungled, and the boy had been needlessly
lost. Important signals had been received from one of the
ships in company, and neither answered nor reported to the
captain. The Medusa had been on fire through negligence.
When she struck, desertion of duty, mean evasion and fierce
recrimination, wasted the precious moments. 'It is probable
that if one of the first officers had set the example, order
would have been restored; but every one was left to himself.'
The most virtuous aspiration of which the soldiers were sensi-
ble, was, to fire upon their officers, and, failing that, to tear
their eyes out and rend them to pieces. The historians com-
pute that there were not in all upon the raft — before the sick
were thrown into the sea — more than twenty men of decency,
education, and purpose enough, even to oppose the maniacs.
To crown all, they describe the soldiers as 'wretches who were
not worthy to wear the French uniform. They were the scum
of all countries, the refuse of the prisons, where they had
been collected to make up the force. When, for the sake of
health, they had been made to bathe in the sea (a ceremony
from which some of them had the modesty to endeavour to
excuse themselves), the whole crew had had ocular demonstra-
tion that it was not upon their breasts these heroes wore the
insignia of the exploits which had led to their serving the state
in the ports of Toulon, Brest, or Rochefort.' And is it with
the scourged and branded sweepings of the galleys of France,
in their debased condition of eight-and-thirty years ago, that
we shall compare the flower of the trained adventurous spirit
of the English Navy, raised by Parry, Franklin, Richardson,
and Back?
Nearly three hundred years ago, a celebrated case of famine
482
occurred in the Jacques, a French ship, homeward-bound from
Brazil, with forty-five persons on board, of whom twenty-five
were the ship's company. She was a crazy old vessel, fit for
nothing but firewood, and had been out four months, and was
still upon the weary seas far from land, when her whole stock
of provisions was exhausted. The very maggots in the dust
of the bread-room had been eaten up, and the parrots and
monkeys brought from Brazil by the men on board had been
killed and eaten, when two of the men died. Their bodies were
committed to the deep. At least twenty days afterwards, when
they had had perpetual cold and stormy weather, and were
grown too weak to navigate the ship ; when they had eaten
pieces of the dried skin of the wild hog, and leather jackets
and shoes, and the horn-plates of the ship-lanterns, and all
the wax-candles ; the gunner died. His body likewise, was
committed to the deep. They then began to hunt for mice,
so that it became a common thing on board, to see skeleton-
men watching eagerly and silently at mouse-holes, like cats.
They had no wine and no water ; nothing to drink but one lit-
tle glass of cider, each, per day. When they were come to this
pass, two more of the sailors 'died of hunger.' Their bodies
likewise, were committed to the deep. So long and doleful
were these experiences on the barren sea, that the people con-
ceived the extraordinary idea that another deluge had hap-
pened, and there was no land left. Yet, this ship drifted to
the coast of Brittany, and no 'last resource' had ever been ap-
pealed to. It is worth remarking that, after they were saved,
the captain declared he had meant to kill somebody, privately,
next day. Whosoever has been placed in circumstances of
peril, with companions, will know the infatuated pleasure some
imaginations take in enhancing them and all their remotest
possible consequences, after they are escaped from, and will
know what value to attach to this declaration.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a ship's master and fifteen
men escaped from a wreck in an open boat, which they weighed
down very heavy, and were at sea, with no fresh-water, and
nothing to eat but the floating sea-weed, seven days and nights.
'We will all live or die together,' said the master on the third
day, when one of the men proposed to draw lots — not who
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 483
should become the last resource, but who should be thrown
overboard to lighten the boat. On the fifth day, that man
and another died. The rest were 'very weak and praying for
death' ; but these bodies also, were committed to the deep.
In the reign of George the Third, the Wager, man-of-war,
one of a squadron badly found and provided in all respects,
sailing from England for South America, was wrecked on the
coast of Patagonia. She was commanded by a brutal though
bold captain, and manned by a turbulent crew, most of whom
were exasperated to a readiness for all mutiny by having been
pressed in the Downs, in the hour of their arrival at home from
long and hard service. When the ship struck, they broke open
the officers' chests, dressed themselves in the officers' uniforms,
and got drunk in the old, Smollett manner. About a hundred
and fifty of them made their way ashore, and divided into par-
ties. Great distress was experienced from want of food, and
one of the boys, 'having picked up the liver of one of the
drowned men whose carcase had been dashed to pieces against
the rocks, could be with difficulty withheld from making a
meal of it.' One man, in a quarrel, on a spot which, in re-
membrance of their sufferings there, they called Mount Mis-
ery, stabbed another mortally, and left him dead on the
ground. Though a third of the whole number were no more,
chiefly through want, in eight or ten weeks ; and though they
had in the meantime eaten a midshipman's dog, and were now
glad to feast on putrid morsels of seal that had been thrown
away ; certain men came back to this Mount Misery, ex-
pressly to give this body (which throughout had remained
untouched), decent burial: assigning their later misfortunes
Ho their having neglected this necessary tribute.' Afterwards,
in an open-boat navigation, when rowers died at their oars of
want and its attendant weakness, and there was nothing to
serve out but bits of rotten seal, the starving crew went ashore
to bury the bodies of their dead companions, in the sand. At
such a condition did even these ill-nurtured, ill-commanded, ill-
used men arrive, without appealing to the 'last resource,' that
they were so much emaciated 'as hardly to have the shape of
men,' while the captain's legs 'resembled posts, though his
body appeared to be nothing but skin and bone,' and he had
484 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
fallen into that feeble state of intellect that he had positively
forgotten his own name.
In the same reign, an East Indiaman, bound from Surat to
Mocha and Jidda in the Dead Sea, took fire when two hun-
dred leagues distant from the nearest land, which was the coast
of Malabar. The mate and ninety-five other people, white,
brown, and black, found themselves in the long-boat, with this
voyage before them, and neither water nor provisions on
board. The account of the mate who conducted the boat,
day and night, is, 'We were never hungry, though our thirst
was extreme. On the seventh day, our throats and tongues
swelled to such a degree, that we conveyed our meaning by
signs. Sixteen died on that day, and almost the whole people
became silly, and began to die laughing. I earnestly peti-
tioned God that I might continue in my senses to my end,
which He was pleased to grant: I being the only person on
the eighth day that preserved them. Twenty more died that
day. On the ninth I observed land, which overcame my
senses, and I fell into a swoon with thankfulness of joy.'
Again no last resource, and can the reader doubt that they
would all have died without it?
In the same reign, and. within a few years of the same date,
the Philip Aubin, bark of eighty tons, bound from Barbadoes
to Surinam, broached-to at sea, and foundered. The captain,
the mate, and two seamen, got clear of the wreck and into 'a
small boat twelve or thirteen feet long.' In accomplishing
this escape, they all, but particularly the captain, showed
great coolness, courage, sense, and resignation. They took
the captain's dog on board, and picked up thirteen onions
which floated out of the ship, after she went down. They
had no water, no mast, sail, or oars; nothing but the boat,
what they wore, and a knife. The boat had sprung a leak,
which was stopped with a shirt. They cut pieces of wood
from the boat itself, which they made into a mast ; they rigged
the mast with strips of the shirt ; and they hoisted a pair of
wide trousers for a sail. The little boat being cut down al-
most to the water's edge, they made a bulwark against the sea,
of their own backs. The mate steered with a topmast he had
pushed before him to the boat, when he swam to it. On the
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 485
third day, they killed the dog, and drank his blood out of a
hat. On the fourth day, the two men gave in, saying they
would rather die than toil on ; and one persisted in refusing to
do his part in bailing the boat, though the captain implored
him on his knees. But, a very decided threat from the mate to
steer him into the other world with the topmast by bringing
it down upon his skull, induced him to turn-to again. On the
fifth day, the mate exhorted the rest to cut a piece out of his
thigh, and quench their thirst ; but, no one stirred. He had
eaten more of the dog than any of the rest, and would seem
from this wild proposal to have been the worse for it, though
he was quite steady again next day, and derived relief (as the
captain did), from turning a nail in his mouth, and often
sprinkling his head with salt-water. The captain, first and
last, took only a few mouthf uls of the dog, and one of the sea-
men only tasted it, and the other would not touch it. The
onions they all thought of small advantage to them, as en-
gendering greater thirst. On the eighth day, the two sea-
men, who had soon relapsed and become delirious and quite
oblivious of their situation, died, within three hours of each
other. The captain and mate saw the Island of Tobago that
evening, but could not make it until late in the ensuing night.
The bodies were found in the boat, unmutilated by the last
resource.
In the same reign still, and within three years of this disas-
ter, the American brig, Tyrel, sailed from New York for the
Island of Antigua. She was a miserable tub, grossly unfit
for sea, and turned bodily over in a gale of wind, five days
after her departure. Seventeen people took to a boat, nine-
teen feet and a half long, and less than six feet and a half
broad. They had half a peck of white biscuit, changed into
salt dough by the sea-water ; and a peck of common ship-bis-
cuit. They steered their course by the polar-star. Soon af-
ter sunset on the ninth day, the second mate and the carpenter
died very peacefully. 'All betook themselves to prayers, and
then after some little time stripped the bodies of their two un-
fortunate comrades, and threw them overboard.' Next night,
a man aged sixty-four who had been fifty years at sea, died,
asking to the last for a drop of water; next day, two more
486 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
died, in perfect repose ; next night, the gunner ; four more in
the succeeding four-and-twenty hours. Five others followed
in one day. And all these bodies were quietly thrown over-
board— though with great difficulty at last, for the survivors
were now exceeding weak, and not one had strength to pull an
oar. On the fourteenth or fifteenth morning, when there
were only three left alive, and the body of the cabin boy,
newly dead, was in the boat, the chief mate 'asked his two com-
panions whether they thought they could eat any of the boy's
flesh? They signified their inclination to try; whence, the
body being quite cold, he cut a piece from the inside of its
thigh, a little above the knee. Part of this he gave to the
captain and boatswain, and reserved a small portion to him-
self. But, on attempting to swallow the flesh, it was rejected
by the stomachs of all, and the body was therefore thrown
overboard.' Yet that captain, and that boatswain both died
of famine in the night, and another whole 'week elapsed before
a schooner picked up the chief mate, left alone in the boat
with their unmolested bodies, the dumb evidence of his story.
Which bodies the crew of that schooner saw, and buried in the
deep.
Only four years ago, in the autumn of eighteen hundred
and fifty, a party of British missionaries were most indis-
creetly sent out by a Society, to Patagonia. They were seven
in number, and all died near the coast ( as nothing but a mira-
cle could have prevented their doing), of starvation. An ex-
ploring party, under Captain Moorshead of her Majesty's
ship Dido, came upon their traces, and found the remains of
four of them, lying by their two boats which they had hauled
up for shelter. Captain Gardiner, their superintendent, who
had probably expired the last, had kept a journal until the
pencil had dropped from his dying hand. They had buried
three of their party, like Christian men, and the rest had faded
away in quiet resignation, and without great suffering. They
were kind and helpful to one another, to the last. One of
the common men, just like Adam with Franklin, was 'cast down
at the loss of his comrades, and wandering in his mind' before
he passed away.
Against this strong case in support of our general posi-
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 487
tion, we will faithfully set four opposite instances we have
sought out.
The first is the case of the New Horn, Dutch vessel, which
was burnt at sea and blew up with a great explosion, upwards
of two hundred years ago. Seventy-two people escaped in
two boats. The old Dutch captain's narrative being rather
obscure, and (as we believe) scarcely traceable beyond a
French translation, it is not easy to understand how long they
were at sea, before the people fell into the state to which the
ensuing description applies. According to our calculation,
however, they had not been shipwrecked many days — we take
the period to have been less than a week — and they had had
seven or eight pounds of biscuit on board. 'Our misery daily
increased, and the rage of hunger urging us to extremities, the
people began to regard each other with ferocious looks. Con-
sulting among themselves, they secretly determined to devour
the boys on board, and after their bodies were consumed, to
throw lots who should next suffer death, that the lives of the
rest might be preserved.' The captain dissuading them from
this with the utmost loathing and horror, they reconsidered
the matter, and decided 'that should we not get sight of land
in three days, the boys should be sacrificed.' On the last of
the three days, land was made ; so, whether any of them would
have executed this intention, can never be known.
The second case runs thus. In the last year of the last cen-
tury, six men were induced to desert from the English artil-
lery at St. Helena — a deserter from any honest service is not
a character from which to expect much — and to go on board
an American ship, the only vessel then lying in those roads.
After they got on board in the dark, they saw lights moving
about on shore, and, fearful that they would be missed and
taken, went over the side, with the connivance of the ship's
people, got into the whale boat, and made off: purposing to be
taken up again by and by, when the ship was under weigh.
But, they missed her, and rowed and sailed about for sixteen
days, at the end of which their provisions were all consumed.
After chewing bamboo, and gnawing leather, and eating a
dolphin, one of them proposed, when ten days more had run
out, that lots should be drawn which deserter should bleed
488 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
himself to death, to support life in the rest. It was agreed to,
and done. They could take very little of this food.
The third, is the case of the Nottingham Galley, trading
from Great Britain to America, which was wrecked on a rock
called Boon Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. About
two days afterwards — the narrative is not very clear in its
details — the cook died on the rock. 'Therefore,' writes the
captain, 'we laid him in a convenient place for the sea to carry
him away. None then proposed to eat his body, though sev-
eral afterwards acknowledged that they, as well as myself, had
thoughts of it.' They were 'tolerably well supplied with
fresh-water throughout.' But, when they had been upon the
rock about a fortnight, and had eaten all their provisions, the
carpenter died. And then the captain writes: 'We suffered
the body to remain with us till morning, when I desired those
who were best able to remove it. I crept out myself to see
whether Providence had yet sent us anything to satisfy our
craving appetites. Returning before noon, and observing
that the dead body still remained, I asked the men why they
had not removed it: to which they answered, that all were not
able. I therefore fastened a rope to it, and, giving the ut-
most of my assistance, we, with some difficulty, got it out of
the tent. But the fatigue and consideration of our misery
together, so overcame my spirits, that, being ready to faint,
I crept into the tent and was no sooner there, than, as the
highest aggravation of distress, the men began requesting me
to give them the body of their lifeless comrade to eat, the bet-
ter to support their own existence.' The captain ultimately
complied. They became brutalised and ferocious; but they
suffered him to keep the remains on a high part of the rock :
and they were not consumed when relief arrived.
The fourth and last case, is the wreck of the St. Laurence,
bound from Quebec for New York. An ensign of foot, bring-
ing home despatches, relates how she went ashore on a desolate
part of the coast of North America, and how those who were
saved from the wreck suffered great hardships, both by land
and sea, and were thinned in their numbers by death, and
buried their dead. All this time they had some provisions,
though they ran short, but at length they were reduced to live
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 489
upon weed and tallow and melted snow. The tallow being all
gone, they lived on weed and snow for three days, and then
the ensign came to this 'The time was now arrived when I
thought it highly expedient to put the plan before mentioned
(casting lots who should be killed) into execution; but on
feeling the pulse of my companions, I found some of them
rather averse to the proposal. The desire of life still pre-
vailed above every other sentiment, notwithstanding the
wretchedness of our condition, and the impossibility of pre-
serving it by any other method. I thought it an extraor-
dinary instance of infatuation, that men should prefer the
certainty of a lingering and miserable death, to the distant
chance of escaping one more immediate and less painful.
However, on consulting with the mate what was to be done, I
found that although they objected to the proposal of casting
lots for the victim, yet all concurred in the necessity of some
one being sacrificed for the preservation of the rest. The
only question was how it should be determined ; when by a
kind of reasoning more agreeable to the dictates of self-love
than justice, it was agreed, that as the captain was now so
exceedingly reduced as to be evidently the first who would
sink under our present complicated misery ; as he had been the
person to whom we considered ourselves in some measure in-
debted for all our misfortunes ; and further, as he had ever
since our shipwreck been the most remiss in his exertions to-
wards the general good — he was undoubtedly the person who
should be the first sacrificed.' The design of which the ensign
writes with this remarkable coolness, was not carried into ex-
ecution, by reason of their falling in with some Indians ; but,
some of the party who were afterwards separated from the
rest, declared when they rejoined them, that they had eaten of
the remains of their deceased companions. Of this case it is
to be noticed that the captain is alleged to have been a mere
kidnapper, sailing under false pretences, and therefore not
likely to have had by any means a choice crew; that the
greater part of them got drunk when the ship was in danger;
and that they had not a very sensitive associate in the ensign,
on his own highly disagreeable showing.
It appears to us that the influence of great privation upor
490 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the lower and less disciplined class of character, is much more
bewildering and maddening at sea than on shore. The con-
fined space, the monotonous aspect of the waves, the mournful
w^inds, the monotonous motion, the dead uniformity of colour,
the abundance of water that cannot be drunk to quench the
raging thirst (which the Ancient Mariner perceived to be one
of his torments) — these seem to engender a diseased mind with
greater quickness and of a worse sort. The conviction on the
part of the sufferers that they hear voices calling for
them ; that they descry ships coming to their aid ; that they
hear the firing of guns, and see the flash ; that they can plunge
into the waves without injury, to fetch something or to meet
somebody ; is not often paralleled among suffering travellers
by land. The mirage excepted — a delusion of the desert,
which has its counterpart upon the sea, not included under
these heads — we remember nothing of this sort experienced by
Bruce, for instance, or by Mungo Park : least of all by Frank-
lin in the memorable book we have quoted. Our comparison
of the records of the two kinds of trial, leads us to believe,
that even men who might be in danger of the last resource at
sea, would be very likely to pine away by degrees, and never
come to it, ashore.
In his published account of the ascent of Mont Blanc,
which is an excellent little book, Mr. Albert Smith describes,
with very humorous fidelity, that when he was urged on by the
guides, in a drowsy state when he would have given the world
to lie down and go to sleep for ever, he was conscious of being
greatly distressed by some difficult and altogether imaginary
negotiations respecting a non-existent bedstead; also, by an
impression that a familiar friend in London came up with the
preposterous intelligence that the King of Prussia objected to
Hie party's advancing, because it was his ground. But, these
harmless vagaries are not the present question, being commonly
experienced under most circumstances where an effort to fix
the attention, or exert the body, contends with a strong dispo-
sition to sleep. We have been their sport thousands of times,
and have passed through a series of most inconsistent and ab-
surd adventures, while trying hard to follow a short dull story
related by some eminent conversationalist after dinner.
THE LOST ARCTIC VOYAGERS 491
No statement of cannibalism, whether on the deep or the
dry land, it to be admitted supposititiously, or inferentially, or
on any but the most direct and positive evidence : no, not even
as occurring among savage people, against whom it was in
earlier times too often a pretence for cruelty and plunder.
Mr. Prescott, in his brilliant history of the Conquest of Mex-
ico, observes of a fact so astonishing as the existence of can-
nibalism among a people who had attained considerable ad-
vancement in the arts and graces of life, that 'they did not
feed on human flesh merely to gratify a brutish appetite, but
in obedience to their religion — a distinction,' he justly says,
'worthy of notice.' Besides which, it is to be remarked, that
many of these feeding practices rest on the authority of nar-
rators who distinctly saw St. James and the Virgin Mary
fighting at the head of the troops of Cortes, and who pos-
sessed, therefore, to say the least, and unusual range of vision.
It is curious to consider, with our general impressions on the
subject — very often derived, we have no doubt, from Rob-
inson Crusoe, if the oaks of men's beliefs could be traced back
to acorns — how rarely the practice, even among savages, has
been proved. The word of a savage is not to be taken for it ;
firstly, because he is a liar; secondly, because he is a boaster;
thirdly, because he often talks figuratively; fourthly, be-
cause he is given to a superstitious notion that when he tells
you he has his enemy in his stomach, you will logically give
him credit for having his enemy's valour in his heart. Even
the sight of cooked anfl dissevered human bodies among this
or that tattoo'd tribe, is not proof. Such appropriate offer-
ings to their barbarous, wide-mouthed, goggle-eyed gods, sav-
ages have been often seen and known to make. And although
it may usually be held as a rule, that the fraternity of priests
lay eager hands upon everything meant for the gods, it is
always possible that these offerings are an exception: as at
once investing the idols with an awful character, and the
priests with a touch of disinterestedness, whereof their order
may occasionally stand in need.
The imaginative people of the East, in the palmy days of
its romance — not very much accustomed to the sea, perhaps,
but certainly familiar by experience and tradition with the
492 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
perils of the desert — had no notion of the 'last resource'
among civilised human creatures. In the whole wide circle
of the Arabian Nights, it is reserved for ghoules, gigantic
blacks with one eye, monsters like towers, of enormous bulk
and dreadful aspect, and unclean animals lurking on the sea-
shore, that puffed and blew their way into caves where the
dead were interred. Even for Sinbad the Sailor, buried alive,
the story-teller found it easier to provide some natural sus-
tenance, in the shape of so many loaves of bread and so mucli
water, let down into the pit with each of the other people
buried alive after him (whom he killed with a bone, for he was
not nice), than to invent this dismal expedient.
We are brought back to the position almost embodied in the
words of Sir John Richardson towards the close of the former
chapter. In weighing the probabilities and improbabilities of
the 'last resource,' the foremost question is — not the nature of
the extremity ; but, the nature of the men. We submit that
the memory of the lost Arctic voyagers is placed, by reason
and experience, high above the taint of this so easily-allowed
connection; and that the noble conduct and example of such
men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar en-
durances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole
universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people,
with a domesticity of blood and blubber. Utilitarianism will
protest 'they are dead ; why care about this?' Our reply shall
be, 'Because they ARE dead, therefore we care about this.
Because they served their country well, and deserved well of
her, and can ask, no more on this earth, for her justice or her
loving-kindness ; give them both, full measure, pressed down,
running over. Because no Franklin can come back, to write
the honest story of their woes and resignation, read it tenderly
and truly in the book he has left us. Because they lie scat-
tered on those wastes of snow, and are as defenceless against
the remembrance of coming generations, as against the ele-
ments into which they are resolving, and the winter winds that
alone can waft them home, now, impalpable air; therefore,
cherish them gently, even in the breasts of children. There-
fore, teach no one to shudder without reason, at the history of
their end. Therefore, confide with their own firmness, in their
fortitude, their lofty sense of duty, their courage, and their
religion.
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
From 'The Examiner,' 'Household Words,'
and 'All the Year Round'
PLAYS AND POEMS
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
CONTENTS
MISCELLANIES FROM 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS'
1850-1859 (continued)
PAGE
That Other Public 8
Gaslight Fairies 10
Gone to the Dogs 18
Fast and Loose 26
The Thousand and One Humbugs — i 30
« " « ii 37
" « " ni 45
The Toady Tree 53
Cheap Patriotism 59
Smuggled Relations 65
The Great Baby . 72
The Worthy Magistrate 80
A Slight Depreciation of the Currency . .... . 82
Insularities t. ...... . 87
A Nightly Scene in London . .,...,.• „..!•,-,; *• • . • • 95
The Friend of the Lions . V . * ^ .,., ,r ., .,•;.-....*.. ,; • 100
Why? 'v..(..\/. . v, ,.'r;_, ., ..._. . 104
Railway Dreaming .... . ^ . : .[ . ; .
xi
xii MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
PAGE
The Demeanour of Murderers 120
Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody 126
The Murdered Person . . . . . . . . .130
Murderous Extremes 136
Stores for the First of April 140
The Best Authority 153
Curious Misprint in the 'Edinburgh Review' . . .160
Well-Authenticated Rappings 167
An Idea of Mine 176
Please to Leave your Umbrella 181
New Year's Day 187
Chips 200
Supposing! 205
MISCELLANIES FROM 'ALL THE YEAR ROUND'
1859-1869
Address which appeared shortly previous to the comple-
tion of the Twentieth Volume (1868) of intimating
a New Series of 'All the Year Round' . . . .213
The Poor Man and His Beer . 214
Five New Points of Criminal Law 224
Leigh Hunt. A Remonstrance . 226
The Tattlesnivel Bleater 230
The Young Man from the Country 238
An Enlightened Clergyman . . 245
CONTEXTS xiii
Rather a Strong Dose . . .' 247
The Martyr Medium . . . 255
The Late Mr. Stanfield . .' ...... ... . 263
A Slight Question of Fact \ . 265
Landor's Life . . . . t . . (. r . . . . .\,. . 266
PLAYS
The Strange Gentleman - . . 281
The Village Coquettes .. ' '. "M^O .--':^>'f/. u.?; .333
Is She His Wife? or, Something Singular! . '*'} «»i- . 375
The Lamplighter . .' . • . - . . . . • ,! .. . 397
Mr. Nightingale's Diary v ' •'• . 427
No Thoroughfare . . • 463
POEMS
THE PICKWICK PAPERS (1837)
The Ivy Green . .,.-,,, v .,,. , ', , . . ., ,.7^ 515
A Christmas Carol .... . . • ^i,;;,* / > 516
Gabriel Grub's Song . ^or^' ><:x-.:v -if -.-Y M::-» 517
Romance (Sam Weller's Song) . . . .-{.:. 518
THE EXAMINER (1841)
The Fine Old English Gentleman . . . . ff ^ 520
The Quack Doctor's Proclamation . . . . . 522
Subjects for Painters 524
THE PATRICIAN'S DAUGHTER (1841)
Prologue ............ 527
xiv MISCELLANEOUS PAPEKS
PAGE
THE KEEPSAKE (1844)
A Word in Season 529
THE DAILY NEWS (1846)
The British Lion 531
The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers .... 533
LlNES ADDRESSED TO MARK LfiMON ( 1849)
New Song 535
HOUSEHOLD WORDS (1850-1851)
Hiram Power's Greek Slave 536
Aspire! 536
THE LIGHTHOUSE (1855)
Prologue 538
The Song of the Wreck 539
THE FROZEN DEEP (1856)
Prologue 541
THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY (1856)
A Child's Hymn 54g
A.LL THE YEAR ROUND (1859)
The Blacksmith 544
INDEX .... ,547
MISCELLANIES
FROM
'HOUSEHOLD WORDS
1850-1859
(continued)
THAT OTHER PUBLIC
[FEBETJARY 3, 1855]
IN our ninth volume,1 it fell naturally in our way to make a
few inquiries as to the abiding place of that vague noun of
multitude signifying many, The Public. We reminded our
readers that it is never forthcoming when it is the subject of
a joke at the theatre: which is always perceived to be a hit at
some other Public richly deserving it, but not present. The
circumstances of this time considered, we cannot better com-
mence our eleventh volume, than by gently jogging the mem-
ory of that other Public: which is often culpably oblivious of
its own duties, rights, and interests : and to which it is per-
fectly clear that neither we nor our readers are in the least de-
gree related. We are the sensible, reflecting, prompt, Public,
always up to the mark — whereas that other Public persists in
supinely lagging behind, and behaving in an inconsiderate
manner.
To begin with a small example lately revived by our friend,
the Examiner newspaper. What can that other Public mean,
by allowing itself to be fleeced every night of its life, by re-
sponsible persons whom it accepts for its servants? The case
stands thus. Bribes and fees to small officials, had become
quite insupportable at the time when the great Railway Com-
panies sprang into existence. All such abuses they immedi-
ately and very much to their credit, struck out of their system
of management ; the keepers of hotels were soon generally
obliged to follow in this rational direction; the Public (mean-
ing always, that other one, of course) were relieved from a
most annoying and exasperating addition to the hurry and
worry of travel; and the reform, as is in the nature of every
i Household Words, vol. ix. p. 156, in an article entitled 'Where are
They?' written by G. A. Sala.
a
4 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
reform that is necessary and sensible, extended in many smaller
directions, and was beneficially felt in many smaller ways.
The one persistent and unabashed defyer of it, at this mo-
ment, is the Theatre — which pursues its old obsolete course of
refusing to fulfil its contract with that other Public, unless
that other Public, after paying for its box-seats or stalls, will
also pay the wages of theatre servants who buy their places
that they may prey upon that other Public. As if we should
sell our publisher's post to the highest bidder, leaving him to
charge an additional penny or twopence, or as much as he
could get, on every number of Household Words with which
he should graciously favour that other Public! Within a
week or two of this present writing, we paid five shillings, at
nine o'clock in the evening, for our one seat at a pantomime ;
after our cheerful compliance with which demand, a hungry
footpad clapped a rolled-up play-bill to our breast, like the
muzzle of a pistol, and positively stood before the door of
which he was the keeper, to prevent our access (without forfei-
ture of another shilling for his benefit) to the seat we had pur-
chased. Now, that other Public still submits to the gross im-
position, notwithstanding that its most popular entertainer
has abandoned all the profit derivable from it, and has plainly
pointed out its manifest absurdity and extortion. And al-
though to be sure it is universally known that the Theatre,
as an Institution, is in a highly thriving and promising state,
and although we have only to see a play, hap-hazard, to per-
ceive that the great body of ladies and gentlemen representing
it, have educated themselves with infinite labour and expense
in a variety of accomplishments, and have really qualified for
their calling in the true spirit of students of the Fine Arts ;
yet, we take leave to suggest to that other Public with which
our readers and we are wholly unconnected, that these are no
reasons for its being so egregiously gulled.
We just now mentioned Railway Companies. That other
Public is very jealous of Railway Companies. It is not un-
reasonable in being so, for, it is quite at their mercy; we
merely observe that it is not usually slow to complain of them
when it has any cause. It has remonstrated, in its time, about
rates of Fares, and has adduced instances of their being un-
THAT OTHER PUBLIC 5
doubtedly too high. But, has that other Public ever heard of
a preliminary system from which the Railway Companies have
no escape, and which runs riot in squandering treasure to an
incredible amount, before they have excavated one foot of
earth or laid a bar of iron on the ground? Why does that
other Public never begin at the beginning, and raise its voice
against the monstrous charges of soliciting private bills in
Parliament, and conducting inquiries before Committees of
the House of Commons — allowed on all hands to be the very
worst tribunals conceivable by the mind of man? Has that
other Public any adequate idea of the corruption, profusion,
and waste, occasioned by this process of misgovernment?
Supposing it were informed that, ten years ago, the average
Parliamentary and Law expenses of all the then existing Rail-
way Companies amounted to a charge of seven hundred pounds
a mile on every mile of railway made in the United Kingdom,
would it be startled? But, supposing it were told in the next
breath, that this charge was really — not seven, but SEVENTEEN
HUNDRED POUNDS A MILE, what would that other Public (on.
whom, of course, every farthing of it falls), say then? Yet
this is the statement, in so many words and figures, of a docu-
ment issued by the Board of Trade, and which is now rather
scarce — as well it may be, being a perilous curiosity. That
other Public may learn from the same pages, that on the Law
and Parliamentary expenses of a certain Stone and Rugby
Line, the Bill for which was lost (and the Line consequently
not made after all), there was expended the modest little pre-
liminary total of one hundred and forty-six thousand pounds !
That was in the joyful days when counsel learned in Parlia-
mentary Law, refused briefs marked with one hundred guinea
fees, and accepted the same briefs marked with one thousand
guinea fees ; the attorney making the neat addition of a third
cipher, on the spot, with a presence of mind suggestive of his
own little bill against that other Public (quite dissociated
from us as aforesaid), at whom our readers and we are now
bitterly smiling. That was also in the blessed times when,
there being no Public Health Act, Whitechapel paid to tha
tutelary deities, Law and Parliament, six thousand five hun-
dred pounds, to be graciously allowed to pull down, for the
6
public good, a dozen odious streets inhabited by Vice and
Fever.
Our Public know all about these things, and our Public
are not blind to their enormity. It is that other Public, some-
where or other — where can it be? — which is always getting
itself humbugged and talked over. It has been in a maze of
doubt and confusion, for the last three or four years, on that
vexed question, the Liberty of the Press. It has been told by
Noble Lords that the said Liberty is vastly inconvenient. No
doubt it is. No doubt all Liberty is — to some people. Light
is highly inconvenient to such as have their sufficient reasons
for preferring darkness; and soap and water is observed to
be a particular inconvenience to those who would rather be
dirty than clean. But, that other Public finding the Noble
Lords much given to harping betweenwhiles, in a sly dull way,
on this string, became uneasy about it, and wanted to know
what the harpers would have — wanted to know for instance,
how they would direct and guide this dangerous Press. Well,
now they may know. If that other Public will ever learn,
their instruction-book, very lately published, is open before
them. Chapter one is a High Court of Justice; chapter two
is a history of personal adventure, whereof they may hear
more, perhaps, one of these days. The Queen's Representa-
tive in a most important part of the United Kingdom — a
thorough gentleman, and a man of unimpeachable honour
beyond all kind of doubt — knows so little of this Press, that
he is seen in secret personal communication with tainted and
vile instruments which it rejects, buying their praise with the
public money, overlooking their dirty work, and setting them
their disgraceful tasks. One of the great national depart-
ments in Downing Street is exhibited under strong suspicion
of like ignorant and disreputable dealing, to purchase remote
puffery among the most puff -ridden people ever propagated
on the face of this earth. Our Public know this very well,
and have, of course, taken it thoroughly to heart, in its many
suggestive aspects ; but, when will that other Public — always
jagging behindhand in some out of the way place — become
informed about it, and consider it, and act upon it?
It is impossible to over-state the completeness with which
THAT OTHER PUBLIC 7
our Public have got to the marrow of the true question arising
out of the condition of the British Army before Sebastopol.
Our Public know perfectly, that, making every deduction for
haste, obstruction, and natural strength of feeling in the
midst of goading experiences, the correspondence of the Times
has revealed a confused heap of mismanagement, imbecility,
and disorder, under which the nation's bravery lies crushed
and withered. Our Public is profoundly acquainted with
the fact that this is not a new kind of disclosure, but, that
similar defection and incapacity have before prevailed at simi-
lar periods until the labouring age has heaved up a man
strong enough to wrestle with the Misgovernment of England
and throw it on its back. Wellington and Nelson both did
this, and the next great General and Admiral — for whom we
now impatiently wait, but may wait some time, content (if we
can be) to know that it is not the tendency of our service, by
sea or land, to help the greatest Merit to rise — must do the
same, and will assuredly do it, and by that sign ye shall know
them. Our Public reflecting deeply on these materials for
cogitation, will henceforth hold fast by the truth, that the sys-
tem of administering their affairs is innately bad ; that classes
and families and interests, have brought them to a very low
pass ; that the intelligence, steadfastness, foresight, and won-
derful power of resource, which in private undertakings dis-
tinguish England from all other countries, have no vitality in
its public business ; that while every merchant and trader has
enlarged his grasp and quickened his faculties, the Public De-
partments have been drearily lying in state, a mere stupid
pageant of gorgeous coffins and feebly-burning lights ; and
that the windows must now be opened wide, and the candles
put out, and the coffins buried, and the daylight freely ad-
mitted, and the furniture made firewood, and the dirt clean
swept away. This is the lesson from which our Public is
nevermore to be distracted by any artifice, we all know. But,
that other Public. What will they do? They are a humane,
generous, ardent Public; but, will they hold like grim Death
to the flower Warning, we have plucked from this nettle War?
Will they steadily reply to all cajolers, that though every
flannel waistcoat in the civilised, and every bearskin and buf-
8 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
falo-skin in the uncivilised, world, had been sent out in these
days to our ill-clad countrymen (and never reached them),
they would not in the least affect the lasting question, or dis-
pense with a single item of the amendment proved to be need-
ful, and, until made, to be severely demanded, in the whole
household and system of Britannia? When the war is over,
and that other Public, always ready for a demonstration, shall
be busy throwing up caps, lighting up houses, beating drums,
blowing trumpets, and making hundreds of miles of printed
columns of speeches, will they be flattered and wordily-pumped
dry of the one plain issue left, or will they remember it? O
that other Public ! If we — you, and I, and all the rest of us
— could only make sure of that other Public !
Would it not be a most extraordinary remissness on the part
of that other Public, if it were content, in a crisis of uncom-
mon difficulty, to laugh at a Ministry without a Head, and
leave it alone? Would it not be a wonderful instance of the
shortcomings of that other Public, if it were never seen to
stand aghast at the supernatural imbecility of that authority
to which, in a dangerous hour, it confided the body and soul
of the nation? We know what a sight it would be to behold
that miserable patient, Mr. Cabinet, specially calling his rela-
tions and friends together before Christmas, tottering on his
emaciated legs in the last stage of paralysis, and feebly piping
that if such and such powers were not entrusted to him for
instant use, he would certainly go raving mad of defeated
patriotism, and pluck his poor old wretched eyes out in de-
spair; we know with what disdainful emotions we should see
him gratified and then shuffle away and go to sleep: to make
no use of what he had got, and be heard of no more until one
of his nurses, more irritable than the rest, should pull his
weazen nose and make him whine — we know what these experi-
ences would be to us, and Bless us ! we should act upon them
in round earnest — but, where is that other Public, whose in-
difference is the life of such scarecrows, and whom it would
seem that not even plague pestilence and famine, battle murder
and sudden death, can rouse?
There is one comfort in all this. We English are not the
only victims of that other Public. It is to be heard of, else-
THAT OTHER PUBLIC 9
where. It got across the Atlantic, in the train of the Pilgrim
Fathers, and has frequently been achieving wonders in Amer-
ica. Ten or eleven years ago, one Chuzzlewit was heard to
say, that he had found it on that side of the water, doing the
strangest things. The assertion made all sorts of Publics
angry, and there was quite a cordial combination of Publics
to resent it and disprove it. But there is a little book of
Memoirs to be heard of at the present time, which looks as if
young Chuzzlewit had reason in him too. Does the 'smart'
Showman, who makes such a Mermaid, and makes such a
Washington's Nurse, and makes such a Dwarf, and makes such
a Singing Angel upon earth, and makes such a fortune, and,
above all, makes such a book — does he address the free and en-
lightened Public of the great United States: the Public of
State Schools, Liberal Tickets, First-chop Intelligence, and
Universal Education? No, no. That other Public is the
sharks'-prey. It is that other Public, down somewhere or
other, whose bright particular star and stripe are not yet as-
certained, which is so transparently cheated and so hardily
outfaced. For that other Public, the hatter of New York
outbid Creation at the auction of the first Lind seat. For
that other Public, the Lind speeches were made, the tears shed,
the serenades given. It is that other Public, always on the
boil and ferment about anything or nothing, whom the travel-
ling companion shone down upon from the high Hotel-Bal-
conies. It is that other Public who will read, and even buy,
the smart book in which they have so proud a share, and who
will fly into raptures about its being circulated from the old
Ocean Cliffs of the Old Granite State to the Rocky Moun-
tains. It is indubitably in reference to that other Public that
we find the following passage in a book called American Notes.
'Another prominent feature is the love of "smart" dealing,
which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust,
many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a
kn£ve to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a
halter — though it has not been without its retributive opera-
tion ; for, this smartness has done more in a few years to im-
pair the public credit and to cripple the public resources, than
dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a century.
10 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a
successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its or his observance
of the golden rule, "Do as you would be done by," but are
considered with reference to their smartness. The following
dialogue I have held a hundred times : — "Is it not a very dis-
graceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-So should
be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odi-
ous means ; and, notwithstanding all the crimes of which he
has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your Citi-
zens? He is a public nuisance, is he not?" — "Yes, sir." — "A
convicted liar?" — "Yes, sir." — ''He has been kicked and cuffed
and caned?" — "Yes, sir." — "And he is utterly dishonourable,
debased, and profligate ?" — " Yes, sir." — "In the name of won-
der, then, what is his merit?" — "Well, sir, he is a smart man."
That other Public of our own bore their full share, and
more, of bowing down before the Dwarf aforesaid, in despite
of his obviously being too young a child to speak plainly : and
we, the Public who are never taken in, -will not excuse their
folly. So, if John on this shore, and Jonathan over there,
could each only get at that troublesome other Public of his,
and brighten them up a little, it would be very much the bet-
ter for both brothers.
GASLIGHT FAIRIES
[FEBRUARY 10, 1855]
FANCY an order for five-and-thirty Fairies ! Imagine a mor-
tal in a loose-sleeved great-coat, with the mud of London
streets upon his legs, commercially ordering, in the common-
place, raw, foggy forenoon, 'five-and-thirty more Fairies' !
Yet I, the writer, heard the order given. 'Mr. Vernon, let me
have five-and-thirty more Fairies to-morrow morning — and
take care they are good ones.'
Where was it that, towards the close of the year one thou-
sand eight hundred and fifty-four, on a dark December morn-
ing, I overheard this astonishing commission given to Mr.
Vernon, and by Mr. Vernon accepted without a word of re-
GASLIGHT FAIRIES 11
monstrance and entered in a note-book? It was in a dark,
deep gulf of a place, hazy with fog — at the bottom of a sort
of immense well without any water in it; remote crevices and
chinks of daylight faintly visible on the upper rim ; dusty
palls enveloping the sides ; gas flaring at my feet ; hammers
going, in invisible workshops ; groups of people hanging
about, trying to keep their toes and fingers warm, what time
their noses were dimly seen through the smoke of their own
breath. It was in the strange conventional world where the
visible people only, never advance ; where the unseen painter
learns and changes ; where the unseen tailor learns and
changes ; where the unseen machinist adapts to his purpose
the striding ingenuity of the age ; where the electric light
comes, in a box that is carried under a man's arm ; but, where
the visible flesh and blood is so persistent in one routine that,
from the waiting-woman's apron-pockets (with her hands in
them), upward to the smallest retail article in the 'business'
of mad Lear with straws in his wig, and downward to the last
scene but one of the pantomime, where, for about one hun-
dred years last past, all the characters have entered groping,
in exactly the same way, in identically the same places, under
precisely the same circumstances, and without the smallest
reason — I say, it was in that strange world where the visible
population have so completely settled their so-potent art, that
when I pay my money at the door I know beforehand every-
thing that can possibly happen to me, inside. It was in the
Theatre, that I heard this order given for five-and-thirty
Fairies.
And hereby hangs a recollection, not out of place, though
not of a Fairy. Once, on just such another December morn-
ing, I stood on the same dusty boards, in the same raw atmos-
phere, intent upon a pantomime-rehearsal. A massive giant's
castle arose before me, and the giant's body-guard marched
in to comic music ; twenty grotesque creatures, with little arms
and legs, and enormous faces moulded into twenty varieties of
ridiculous leer. One of these faces in particular — an absurdly
radiant face, with a wink upon it, and its tongue in its cheek
— elicited much approving notice from the authorities, and a
ready laugh from the orchestra, and was, for a full half min-
12 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ute, a special success. But, it happened that the wearer of
the beaming visage carried a banner; and, not to turn a ban-
ner as a procession moves, so as always to keep its decorated
side towards the audience, is one of the deadliest sins a banner-
bearer can commit. This radiant goblin, being half-blinded
by his mask, and further disconcerted by partial suffocation,
three distinct times omitted the first duty of man, and petrified
us by displaying, with the greatest ostentation, mere sackcloth
and timber, instead of the giant's armorial bearings. To
crown which offence he couldn't hear when he was called to,
but trotted about in his richest manner, unconscious of threats
and imprecations. Suddenly, a terrible voice was heard above
the music, crying, 'Stop !' Dead silence, and we became aware
of Jove in the boxes. 'Hatchway,' cried Jove to the direc-
tor, 'who is that man? Show me that man.' Hereupon
Hatchway (who had a wooden leg), vigorously apostrophising
the defaulter as an 'old beast,' stumped straight up to the
body-guard now in line before the castle, and taking the
radiant countenance by the nose, lifted it up as if it were a
saucepan-lid, and disclosed below, the features of a bald, su-
perannuated, aged person, very much in want of shaving, who
looked in the forlornest way at the spectators, while the large
face aslant on the top of his head mocked him. 'What ! It 's
you, is it?' said Hatchway, with dire contempt. 'I thought
it was you.' 'I knew it was that man!' cried Jove. 'I told
you yesterday, Hatchway, he was not fit for it. Take him
away, and bring another!' He was ejected with every mark
of ig-nominy, and the inconstant mask was just as funny on
another man's shoulders immediately afterwards. To the
present day, I never see a very comic pantomime-mask but I
wonder whether this wretched old man can possibly have got
behind it ; and I never think of him as dead and buried (which
is far more likely), but I make that absurd countenance a part
of his mortality, and picture it to myself as gone the way of
all the winks in the world.
Five-and-thirty more Fairies, and let them be good ones.
I saw them next day. They ranged from an anxious woman
of ten, learned in the prices of victual and fuel, up to a con-
^ceited young lady of five times that age, who always persisted
13
in standing on one leg longer than was necessary, with the
determination (as I was informed), 'to make a Part of it.'
This Fairy was of long theatrical descent — centuries, I be-
lieve— and had never had an ancestor who was entrusted to
communicate one word to a British audience. Yet, the whole
race had lived and died with the fixed idea of 'making a Part
of it' ; and she, the last of the line, was still unchangeably re-
solved to go down on one leg to posterity. Her father had
fallen a victim to the family ambition ; having become in
course of time so extremely difficult to 'get off,' as a villager,
seaman, smuggler, or what not, that it was at length consid-
ered unsafe to allow him to 'go on.' Consequently, those neat
confidences with the public in which he had displayed the very
acme of his art — usually consisting of an explanatory tear,
or an arch hint in dumb show of his own personal determina-
tion to perish in the attempt then on foot — were regarded as
superfluous, and came to be dispensed with, exactly at the
crisis when he himself foresaw that he would 'be put into
Parts' shortly. I had the pleasure of recognizing in the char-
acter of an Evil Spirit of the Marsh, overcome by this lady
with one (as I should else have considered purposeless) poke
of a javelin, an actor whom I had formerly encountered in the
provinces under circumstances that had fixed him agreeably
in my remembrance. The play represented to a nautical audi-
ence, was Hamlet ; and this gentleman having been killed with
much credit as Polonius, reappeared in the part of Osric:
provided against recognition by the removal of his white wig,
and the adjustment round his waist of an extremely broad
belt and buckle. He was instantly recognised, notwithstand-
ing these artful precautions, and a solemn impression was
made upon the spectators for which I could not account, until
a sailor in the Pit drew a long breath, said to himself in a
deep voice, 'Slowed if here an't another Ghost !' and composed
himself to listen to a second communication from the tomb.
Another personage whom I recognized as taking refuge un-
der the wings of Pantomime (she was not a Fairy, to be sure,
but she kept the cottage to which the Fairies came, and lived
in a neat upper bedroom, with her legs obviously behind the
street door), was a country manager's wife — a most estima-
14 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ble woman of about fifteen stone, with a larger family than
I had ever been able to count: whom I had last seen in Lin-
colnshire, playing Juliet, while her four youngest children
(and nobody else) were in the boxes — hanging out of window,
as it were, to trace with their forefingers the pattern on the
front, and making all Verona uneasy by their imminent peril
of falling into the Pit. Indeed, I had seen this excellent
woman in the whole round of Shakesperian beauties, and had
much admired her way of getting through the text. If any-
body made any remark to her, in reference to which any sort
of answer occurred to her mind, she made that answer ; other-
wise, as a character in the drama, she preserved an impres-
sive silence, and, as an individual, was heard to murmur to the
unseen person next in order of appearance, 'Come on !' I
found her, now, on good motherly terms with the Fairies, and
kindly disposed to chafe and warm the fingers of the younger
of that race. Out of Fairy-land, I suppose that so many
shawls and bonnets of a peculiar limpness were never assem-
bled together. And, as to shoes and boots, I heartily wished
that 'the good people' were better shod, or were as little liable
to take cold as in the sunny days when they were received at
Court as Godmothers to Princesses.
Twice a-year, upon an average, these gaslight Fairies ap-
pear to us; but, who knows what becomes of them at other
times ? You are sure to see them at Christmas, and they may
be looked for hopefully at Easter; but, where are they
through the eight or nine long intervening months? They
cannot find shelter under mushrooms, they cannot live upon
dew; unable to array themselves in supernatural green, they
must even look to Manchester for cotton stuffs to wear. When
they become visible, you find them a traditionary people, with
a certain conventional monotony in their proceedings which
prevents their surprising you very much, save now and then
when they appear in company with Mr. Beverley. In a gen-
eral way, they have been sliding out of the clouds, for some
years, like barrels of beer delivering at a public-house. They
sit in the same little rattling stars, with glorious corkscrews
twirling about them and never drawing anything, through a
good many successive seasons. They come up in the same
GASLIGHT FAIRIES 15
shells out of the same three rows of gauze water (the little
ones lying down in front, with their heads diverse ways) ; and
you resign yourself to what must infallibly take place when
you see them armed with garlands. You know all you have
to expect of them by moonlight. In the glowing day, you
are morally certain that the gentleman with the muscular legs
and the short tunic (like the Bust at the Hairdresser's, com-
pletely carried out), is coming, when you see them 'getting
over' to one side, while the surprising phenomenon is presented
on the landscape of a vast mortal shadow in a hat of the
present period, violently directing them so to do. You are
acquainted with all these peculiarities of the gaslight Fairies,
and you know by heart everything that they will do with their
arms and legs, and when they will do it. But, as to the same
good people in their invisible condition, it is a hundred to
one that you know nothing, and never think of them.
I began this paper with, perhaps, the most curious trait,
after all, in the history of the race. They are certain to be
found when wanted. Order Mr. Vernon to lay on a hundred
and fifty gaslight Fairies next Monday morning, and they
will flow into the establishment like so many feet of gas.
Every Fairy can bring other Fairies ; her sister Jane, her
friend Matilda, her friend Matilda's friend, her brother's
young family, her mother — if Mr. Vernon will allow that re-
spectable person to pass muster. Summon the Fairies, and
Drury Lane, Soho, Somers' Town, and the neighbourhood of
the obelisk in St. George's Fields, will become alike prolific in
them. Poor, good-humoured, patient, fond of a little self-
display, perhaps, (sometimes, but far from always), they will
come trudging through the mud, leading brother and sister
lesser Fairies by the hand, and will hover about in the dark
stage-entrances, shivering and chattering in their shrill way,
and earning their little money hard, idlers and vagabonds
though we may be pleased to think them. I wish, myself,
that we were not so often pleased to think ill of those who
minister to our amusement. I am far from having satisfied
my heart that either we or they are a bit the better for it.
Nothing is easier than for any one of us to get into a pulpit,
or upon a tub, or a stump, or a platform, and blight (so far
16 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
as with oar bilious and complacent breath we can), any class
of small people we may choose to select. But, it by no means
follows that because it is easy and safe, it is right. Even these
very gaslight Fairies, now. Why should I be bitter on them
because they are shabby personages, tawdrily dressed for the
passing hour, and then to be shabby again? I have known
very shabby personages indeed — the shabbiest I ever heard
of — tawdrily dressed for public performances of other kinds,
and performing marvellously ill too, though transcendently
rewarded: yet whom none disparaged! In even-handed jus-
tice, let me render these little people their due.
Ladies and Gentlemen. Whatever you may hear to the
contrary (and may sometimes have a strange satisfaction in
believing), there is no lack of virtue and modesty among the
Fairies. All things considered, I doubt if they be much be-
low our own high level. In respect of constant asknowledg-
ment of the claims of kindred, I assert for the Fairies, that
they yield to no grade of humanity. Sad as it is to say, I
have known Fairies even to fall, through this fidelity of theirs.
As to young children, sick mothers, dissipated brothers,
fathers unfortunate and fathers undeserving, Heaven and
Earth, how many of these have I seen clinging to the spangled
skirts, and contesting for the nightly shilling or two, of one
little lop-sided, weak-legged Fairy !
Let me, before I ring the curtain down on this short piece,
take a single Fairy, as Sterne took his Captive, and sketch
the Family-Picture. I select Miss Fairy, aged three-and-
twenty, lodging within cannon range of Waterloo Bridge,
London — not alone, but with her mother, Mrs. Fairy, disabled
by chronic rheumatism in the knees ; and with her father, Mr.
Fairy, principally employed in lurking about a public-house,
and waylaying the theatrical profession for twopence where-
with to purchase a glass of old ale, that he may have some-
thing warming on his stomach (which has been cold for fif-
teen years) ; and with Miss Rosina Fairy, Miss Angelica
Fairy, and Master Edmund Fairy, aged respectively, four-
teen, ten, and eight. Miss Fairy has an engagement of twelve
shillings a week — sole means of preventing the Fairy family
from coming to a dead lock. To be sure, at this time of year
GASLIGHT FAIRIES 17
the three young Fairies have a nightly engagement to come
out of a Pumpkin as French soldiers ; but, its advantage to
the housekeeping is rendered nominal, by that dreadful old
Mr. Fairy's making it a legal formality to draw the money
himself every Saturday — and never coming home until his
stomach is warmed, and the money gone. Miss Fairy is pretty
too, makes up very pretty. This is a trying life at the best,
but very trying at the worst. And the worst is, that that
always beery old Fairy, the father, hovers about the stage-
door four or five nights a week, and gets his cronies among the
carpenters and footmen to carry in messages to his daughter
(he is not admitted himself), representing the urgent coldness
of his stomach and his parental demand for twopence ; failing
compliance with which, he creates disturbances ; and getting
which, he becomes maudlin and waits for the manager, to
whom he represents with tears that his darling child and pupil,
the pride of his soul, is 'kept down in the Theatre.' A hard
life this for Miss Fairy, I say, and a dangerous ! And it is
good to see her, in the midst of it, so watchful of Rosina
Fairy, who otherwise might come to harm one day. A hard
life this, I say again, even if John Kemble Fairy, the brother,
who sings a good song, and when he gets an engagement
always disappears about the second week or so and is seen
no more, had not a miraculous property of turning up on a
Saturday without any heels to his boots, firmly purposing to
commit suicide, unless bought off with half-a-crown. And
yet — so curious is the gaslighted atmosphere in which these
Fairies dwell ! — through all the narrow ways of such an ex-
istence, Miss Fairy never relinquishes the belief that that in-
corrigible old Fairy, the father, is a wonderful man ! She is
immovably convinced that nobody ever can, or ever could, ap-
proach him in Holla. She has grown up in this conviction,
will never correct it, will die in it. If, through any wonderful
turn of fortune, she were to arrive at the emolument and
dignity of a Free Benefit to-morrow, she would 'put up' old
Fairy, red nosed, stammering and imbecile — with delirium
tremens shaking his very buttons off — as the noble Peruvian,
and would play Cora herself, with a profound belief in his
taking the town by storm at last.
18 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
GONE TO THE DOGS
[MARCH 10, 1855]
WE all know what treasures Posterity will inherit, in the ful-
ness of time. We all know what handsome legacies are be-
queathed to it every day, what long luggage-trains of Sonnets
it will be the better for, what patriots and statesmen it will
discover to have existed in this age whom we have no idea of,
how very wide awake it will be, and how stone blind the Time
is. We know what multitudes of disinterested persons are al-
ways going down to it, laden, like processions of genii, with
inexhaustible and incalculable wealth. We have frequent ex-
perience of the generosity with which the profoundest wits,
the subtlest politicians, unerring inventors, and lavish bene-
factors of mankind, take beneficent aim at it with a longer
range than Captain Warner's, and blow it up to the very
heaven of heavens, one hundred years after date. We all de-
fer to it as the great capitalist in expectation, the world's
residuary legatee in respect of all the fortunes that are not
just now convertible, the heir of a long and fruitful minority,
the fortunate creature on whom all the true riches of the earth
are firmly entailed. When Posterity does come into its own
at last, what a coming of age there will be !
It seems to me that Posterity, as the subject of so many
handsome settlements, has only one competitor. I find the
Dogs to be every day enriched with a vast amount of valuable
property.
What has become — to begin like Charity at home — what
has become, I demand, of the inheritance I myself entered on,
at nineteen years of age! A shining castle (in the air) with
young Love looking out of window, perfect contentment and
repose of spirit standing with ethereal aspect in the porch,
visions surrounding it by night and day with an atmosphere
of pure gold. This was my only inheritance, and I never
squandered it. I hoarded it like a miser. Say, bright-eyed
Araminta (with the obdurate parents), thou who wast sole
lady of the castle, did I not? Down the flowing river by the
GONE TO THE DOGS 19
walls, called Time, how blest we sailed together, treasuring our
happiness unto death, and never knowing change, or weari-
ness, or separation ! Where is that castle now, with all its
magic furniture? Gone to the Dogs. Canine possession was
taken of the whole of that estate, my youthful Araminta,
about a quarter of a century ago.
Come back, friend of my youth. Come back from the glooms
and shadows that have gathered round thee, and let us sit
down once more, side by side, upon the rough, notched form
at school ! Idle is Bob Tample, given to shirking his work
and getting me to do it for him, inkier than a well-regulated
mind in connection with a well-regulated body is usually ob-
served to be, always compounding with his creditors on pocket-
money days, frequently selling off penknives by auction, and
disposing of his sister's birthday presents at an .enormous
sacrifice. Yet, a rosy, cheerful, thoughtless fellow is Bob
Tample, borrowing with an easy mind, sixpences of Dick
Sage the prudent, to pay eighteenpences after the holidays,
and freely standing treat to all comers. Musical is Bob Tam-
ple. Able to sing and whistle anything. Learns the piano
(in the parlour), and once plays a duet with the musical pro-
fessor, Mr. Goavus of the Royal Italian Opera (occasional-
deputy-assistant-copyist in that establishment, I have since
seen reason to believe), whom Bob's friends and supporters.
I foremost in the throng, consider tripped up in the first
half-dozen bars. Not without bright expectations is Bob
Tample, being an orphan with a guardian near the Bank, and
destined for the army. I boast of Bob at home that his name
is 'down at the Horse Guards,' and that his father left it in his
will that 'a pair of colours' ( I like the expression without par-
ticularly knowing what it means) should be purchased for
him. I go with Bob on one occasion to look at the building
where his name is down. We wonder in which of the rooms
it is down, and whether the two horse soldiers on duty know
it. I also accompany Bob to see his sister at Miss Mag-
giggs's boarding establishment at Hammersmith, and it is un-
necessary to add that I think his sister beautiful and love her.
She will be independent, Bob says. I relate at home that Mr.
Tample left it in his will that his daughter was to be inde-
20 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
pendent. I put Mr. Tample, entirely of my own accord and
invention, into the army ; and I perplex my family circle by
relating feats of valour achieved by that lamented officer at the
Battle of Waterloo, where I leave him dead, with the British
flag (which he wouldn't give up to the last) wound tightly
round his left arm. So we go on, until Bob leaves for Sand-
hurst. / leave in course of time — every body leaves. Years
have gone by, when I twice or thrice meet a gentleman with
a moustache, driving a lady in a very gay bonnet, whose face
recalls the boarding establishment of Miss Maggiggs at Ham-
mersmith, though it does not look so happy as it did under
Miss Maggiggs, iron-handed despot as I believed that accom-
plished woman to be. This leads me to the discovery that the
gentleman with the moustache is Bob ; and one day Bob pulls
up, and talks, and asks me to dinner ; but, on subsequently as-
certaining that I don't play billiards, hardly seems to care as
much about me as I had expected. I ask Bob at this period,
if he is in the service still? Bob answers no my boy, he got
bored and sold out; which induces me to think (for I am
growing worldly), either that Bob must be very independent
indeed, or must be going to the Dogs. More years elapse,
and having quite lost sight and sound of Bob meanwhile, I
say on an average twice a week during three entire twelve-
months, that I really will call at the guardian's near the Bank,
and ask about Bob. At length I do so. Clerks, on being ap-
prised of my errand, became disrespectful. Guardian, with
bald head highly flushed, burst out of inner office, remarks that
he hasn't the honour of my acquaintance, and bursts in again,
without exhibiting the least desire to improve the opportunity
of knowing me. I now begin sincerely to believe that Bob
is going to the Dogs. More years go by, and as they pass
Bob sometimes goes by me too, but never twice in the same
aspect — always tending lower and lower. No redeeming trace
of better things would hang about him now, were he not al-
ways accompanied by the sister. Gay bonnet gone; ex-
changed for something limp and veiled, that might be a mere
porter's knot of the feminine gender, to carry a load of mis-
ery on — shabby, even slipshod. I, by some vague means or
other, come to the knowledge of the fact that she entrusted
GONE TO THE DOGS 21
that independence to Bob, and that Bob — in short, that it has
all gone to the Dogs. One summer day, I descry Bob idling
in the sun, outside a public-house near Drury Lane; she, in
a shawl that clings to her, as only the robes of poverty do
cling to their wearers when all things else have fallen away,
waiting for him at the street corner; he, with a stale, accus-
tomed air, picking his teeth and pondering; two boys watch-
ful of him, not unadmiringly. Curious to know more of this,
I go round that way another day, look at a concert-bill in the
public-house window, and have not a doubt that Bob is Mr.
Berkeley, the celebrated bacchanalian vocalist, who presides at
the piano. From time to time, rumours float by me after-
wards, I can't say how, or where they come from — from the
expectant and insatiate Dogs for anything I know — touch-
ing hushed-up pawnings of sheets from poor furnished lodg-
ings, begging letters to old Miss Maggiggs at Hammersmith,
and the clearing away of all Miss Maggiggs's umbrellas and
clogs, by the gentleman who called for an answer on a certain
foggy evening after dark. Thus downward, until the faith-
ful sister begins to beg of me, whereupon I moralise as to the
use of giving her any money (for I have grown quite worldly
now), and look furtively out of my window as she goes away
by night with that half-sovereign of mine, and think, con-
temptuous of myself, can I ever have admired the crouching
figure plashing through the rain, in a long round crop of
curls at Miss Maggiggs's ! Oftentimes she comes back with
bedridden lines from the brother, who is always nearly dead
and never quite, until he does tardily make an end of it, and at
last this Actaeon reversed has rung the Dogs wholly down and
betaken himself to them finally. More years have passed,
when I dine at Withers's at Brighton on a day, to drink
'Forty-one claret ; and there, Spithers, the new Attorney-Gen-
eral, says to me across the table, 'Weren't you a Mithers's
boy ?' To which I say, 'To be sure I was !' To which he re-
torts, 'And don't you remember me?' To which I retort, 'To
be sure I do' — which I never did until that instant — and then
he says how the fellows have all dispersed, and he has never
seen one of them since, and have I? To which I, finding that
my learned friend has a pleasant remembrance of Bob from
22 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
having given him a black eye on his fifteenth birthday in as-
sertion of his right to 'smug' a pen-wiper forwarded to said
Bob by his sister on said occasion, make response by general-
ising the story I have now completed, and adding that I have
heard that, after Bob's death, Miss Maggiggs, though deuced
poor through the decay of her school, took the sister home to
live with her. My learned friend sayg, upon his word it does
Miss Whatshername credit, and all old Mitherses ought to sub-
scribe a trifle for her. Not seeing the necessity of that, I
praise the wine, and we send it round, the way of the world
(which world I am told is getting nearer to the Sun every
year of its existence), and we bury Bob's memory with the
epitaph that he went to the Dogs.
Sometimes, whole streets, inanimate streets of brick and
mortar houses, go to the Dogs. Why, it is impossible to say,
otherwise than that the Dogs bewitch them, fascinate them,
magnetise them, summon them and they must go. I know of
such a street at the present writing. It was a stately street
in its own grim way, and the houses held together like the
last surviving members of an aristocratic family, and, as a
general rule, were — still not unlike them — very tall and very
dull. How long the Dogs may have had their eyes of tempta-
tion upon this street is unknown to me, but they called to it,
and it went. The biggest house — it was a corner one — went
first. An ancient gentleman died in it; and the undertaker
put up a gaudy hatchment that looked like a very bad trans-
parency, not intended to be seen by day, and only meant to
be illuminated at night; and the attorney put up a bill about
the lease, and put in an old woman (apparently with nothing
to live upon but a cough), who crept away into a corner like
a scared old dormouse, and rolled herself up in a blanket.
The mysterious influence of the Dogs was on the house, and it
immediately began to tumble down. Why the infection should
pass over fourteen houses to seize upon the fifteenth, I don't
know; but, fifteen doors off next began to be fatally dim in
the windows ; and after a short decay, its eyes were closed by
brokers, and its end was desolation. The best house opposite,
unable to bear these sights of woe, got out a black board
with all despatch, respecting unexpired remainder of
GONE TO THE DOGS 23
and cards to view ; and the family fled, and a bricklayer's wife
and children came in to 'mind' the place, and dried their little
weekly wash on lines hung across the dining-room. Black
boards, like the doors of so many hearses taken off the hinges,
now became abundant. Only one speculator, without sus-
picion of the Dogs upon his soul, responded. He repaired
and stuccoed number twenty-four, got up an ornamented
parapet and balconies, took away the knockers, and put in
plate glass, found too late that all the steam power on earth
could never have kept the street from the Dogs when it was
once influenced to go, and drowned himself in a water butt.
Within a year, the house he had renewed became the worst of
all; the stucco decomposing like a Stilton cheese, and the
ornamented parapet coming down in fragments like the sugar
of a broken twelfth cake. Expiring efforts were then made
by a few of the black boards to hint at the eligibility of these
commodious mansions for public institutions, and suites of
chambers. It was useless. The thing was done. The whole
street may now be bought for a mere song. But, nobody will
hear of it, for who dares dispute possession of it with the
Dogs!
Sometimes, it would seem as if the least yelp of these dread-
ful animals, did the business at once. Which of us does not
remember that eminent person — with indefinite resources in
the City, tantamount to a gold mine — who had the delightful
house near town, the famous gardens and gardener, the beau-
tiful plantations, the smooth green lawns, the pineries, the
stabling for five-and-twenty horses, and the standing for half
a dozen carriages, the billiard-room, the music-room, the
picture gallery, the accomplished daughters and aspiring sons,
all the pride and pomp and circumstance of riches? Which
of us does not recall how we knew him through the good
offices of our esteemed friend Swallowfly, who was ambassador
on the occasion? Which of us cannot still hear the gloating
roundness of tone with which Swallowfly informed us that our
new friend was worth five hun-dred thou-sand pounds, sir,
if he was worth a penny? How we dined there with all the
Arts and Graces ministering to us, and how we came away
reflecting that wealth after all was a desirable delight, I
24 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
need not say. Neither need I tell, how we every one of us
met Swallowfly within six little months of that same day,
when Swallowfly observed, with such surprise, *You haven't
heard ? Lord bless me ! Ruined — Channel Islands — gone to
the Dogs !'
Sometimes again, it would seem as though in exceptional
cases here and there, the Dogs relented, or lost their power
over the imperilled man in an inscrutable way. There was
my own cousin — he is dead now, therefore I have no objec-
tion to mention his name — Tom Flowers. He was a
bachelor (fortunately), and, among other ways he had of
increasing his income and improving his prospects, betted
pretty high. He did all sorts of things that he ought not
to have done, and he did everything at a great pace, so it was
clearly seen by all who knew him that nothing would keep him
from the Dogs ; that he was running them down hard, and was
bent on getting into the very midst of the pack with all
possible speed. Well! He was as near them, I suppose, as
ever man was, when he suddenly stopped short, looked them
full in their jowls, and never stirred another inch onward, to
the day of his death. He walked about for seventeen years, a
very neat little figure, with a capital umbrella, an excellent
neckcloth, and a pure white shirt, and he had not got a
hair's-breadth nearer to the horrible animals at the end of that
time than he had when he stopped. How he lived, our family
could never make out — whether the Dogs can have allowed
him anything will always be a mystery to me — but, he dis-
appointed all of us in the matter of the canine epitaph with
which we had expected to dismiss him, and merely enabled
us to remark that poor Tom Flowers was gone at sixty-seven.
It is overwhelming to think of the Treasury of the Dogs.
There are no such fortunes embarked in all the enterprises of
life, as have gone their way. They have a capital Drama,
for their amusement and instruction. They have got hold
of all the People's holidays for the refreshment of weary
frames, and the renewal of weary spirits. They have left
the People little else in that way but a Fast now and then for
the ignorances and imbecilities of their rulers. Perhaps those
25
days will go next. To say the plain truth very seriously, I
shouldn't be surprised.
Consider the last possessions that have gone to the Dogs.
Consider, friends and countrymen, how the Dogs have been
enriched, by your despoilment at the hands of your own
blessed governors — to whom be honour and renown, stars and
garters, for ever and ever! — on the shores of a certain
obscure spot called Balaklava, where Britannia rules the waves
in such an admirable manner, that she slays her children
(who never never never will be slaves, but very very very
often will be dupes), by the thousand, with every movement
of her glorious trident! When shall there be added to the
possessions of the Dogs, those columns of talk, which, let
the columns of British soldiers vanish as they may, still defile
before us wearily, wearily, leading to nothing, doing nothing,
for the most part even saying nothing, only enshrouding
us in a mist of idle breath that obscures the events which
are forming themselves — not into playful shapes, believe me
— beyond. If the Dogs, lately so gorged, still so voracious
and strong, could and would deliver a most gracious bark,
I have a strong impression that their warning would run
thus:
'My Lords and Gentlemen. We are open-mouthed and
eager. Either you must send suitable provender to us without
delay, or you must come to us yourselves. There is no
avoidance of the alternative. Talk never softened the three-
headed dog that kept the passage to the Shades; less will it
appease us. No jocular old gentleman throwing sommer-
saults on stilts because his great-grandmother is not wor-
shipped in Ninevah, is a sop to us for a moment ; no hearing,
cheering, sealing-waxing, tapeing, fire-eating, vote-eating, or
other popular Club-performance, at all imports us. We are
the Dogs. We are known to you just now, as the Dogs of
War. We crouched at your feet for employment, as Wil-
liam Shakespeare, plebeian, saw us crouching at the feet of
the Fifth Harry — and you gave it us ; crying Havoc ! in
good English, and letting us slip (quite by accident), on
good Englishmen. With our appetites so whetted, we are
26 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
hungry. We are sharp of scent and quick of sight, and
we see and smell a great deal coming to us rather rapidly.
Will you give us such old rubbish as must be ours in any
case? My Lords and Gentlemen, make haste! Something
must go to the Dogs in earnest. Shall it be you, or some-
thing else?'
FAST AND LOOSE
[MARCH 24, 1855]
IF the Directors of any great joint-stock commercial under-
taking— say a Railway Company — were to get themselves
macfc Directors principally in virtue of some blind supersti-
tion declaring every man of the name of Bolter to be a man
of business, every man of the name of Jolter to be a mathe-
matician, and every man of the name of Polter to possess a
minute acquaintance with the construction of locomotive
steam-engines ; and if those ignorant Directors so managed
the affairs of the body corporate, as that the trains never
started at the right times, began at their right beginnings, or
got to their right ends, but always devoted their steam to
bringing themselves into violent collision with one another ;
and if by such means incapable Directors destroyed thousands
of lives, wasted millions of money, and hopelessly bewildered
and conglomerated themselves and everybody else ; what would
the shareholding body say, if those brazen-faced Directors
called them together in the midst of the wreck and ruin
they had made, and with an audacious piety addressed
them thus : 'Lo, ye miserable sinners, the hand of Providence
is heavy on you ! Attire yourselves in sackcloth, throw ashes
on your heads, fast, and hear us condescend to make dis-
courses to you on the wrong you have doneP
Or, if Mr. Matthew Marshall of the Bank of England, were
to be superseded by Bolter; if the whole Bank parlour were
to be cleared for Jolter; and the engraving of bank-notes
were to be given as a snug thing to Polter ; and if Bolter Jolter
FAST AND LOOSE 27
and Polter, with a short pull and a weak pull and a pull no
two of them together, should tear the Money Market to
pieces, and rend the whole mercantile system and credit of
the country to shreds ; what kind of a reception would
Bolter Jolter and Polter get from Baring Brothers, Roths-
childs, and Lombard Street in general, if those Incapables
should cry out, 'Providence has brought you all to the
Gazette. Listen, wicked ones, and we will give you an im-
proving lecture on the death of the old Lady in Thread-
needle Street !'
Or, if the servants in a rich man's household were to dis-
tribute their duties exactly as the fancy took them; if the
housemaid were to undertake the kennel of hounds, and the
dairymaid were to mount the coachbox, and the cook were
to pounce upon the secretaryship, and the groom were to
dress the dinner, and the game-keeper were to make the beds,
while the gardener gave the young ladies lessons on the piano,
and the stable-helper took the baby out for an airing;
would the rich man, soon very poor, be much improved in
his mind when the whole incompetent establishment, sur-
rounding him, exclaimed, 'You have brought yourself to
a pretty pass, sir. You had better see what fasting and
humiliation will do to get you out of this. We will
trouble you to pay us, keep us, and try !'
A very fine gentleman, very daintily dressed, once took
an uncouth creature under his protection — a wild thing, half
man and half brute. And they travelled along together.
The wild man was ignorant; but he had some desire for
knowledge too, and at times he even fell into strange fits of
thought, wherein he had gleams of reason and flashes of a
quick sagacity. There was also veneration in his breast,
for the Maker of all the wondrous universe about him. It
has even been supposed that these seeds were sown within him
by a greater and wiser hand than the hand of the very fine
gentleman very daintily dressed.
It was necessary that they should get on quickly to avoid a
storm, and the first thing that happened was, that the
wild man's feet became crippled.
Now, the very fine gentleman had made the wild man
28 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
put on a tight pair of boots which were altogether unsuited to
him, so the wild man said:
'It 's the boots.'
'It 's a Rebuke,' said the very fine gentleman.
'A WHAT?' roared the wild man.
'It 's Providence,' said the very fine gentleman.
The wild man cast his eyes on the earth around him, and
up to the sky, and then at the very fine gentleman, and was
mightily displeased to hear that great word so readily in the
mouth of such an interpreter on such an occasion; but, he
hobbled on as well as he could without saying a syllable,
until they had gone a very long way, and he was hungry.
There was abundance of wholesome fruits and herbs by the
wayside, which the wild man tried to reach by springing
at them, but could not.
'I am starving,' the wild man complained.
'It 's a Rebuke,' said the very fine gentleman.
'It 's the handcuffs,' said the wild man. For, he had sub-
mitted to be handcuffed before he came out.
However, his companion wouldn't hear of that (he said it
was not official, and was unparliamentary), so they went on
and on, a weary journey; and the wild man got nothing, be-
cause he was handcuffed, and because the very fine gentleman
couldn't reach the fruit for him on account of his stays ; and
the very fine gentleman got what he had in his pocket.
By and by, they came to a house on fire, where the wild
man's brother was being burnt to death, because he couldn't
get out at the door; which door had been locked seven
years before, by the very fine gentleman, who had taken
away the key.
'Produce the key,' exclaimed the wild man, in an agony,
'and let my brother out.'
'I meant it to have been here the day before yesterday,'
returned the very fine gentleman, in his leisurely way, 'and I
had it put aboard ship to be brought here ; but, the fact is,
the ship has gone round the world instead of coming here,
and I doubt if we shall ever hear any more about it.'
'It 's Murder!' cried the wild man.
But, the very fine gentleman was uncommonly high with
FAST AND LOOSE 29
him, for not knowing better than that: so the brother was
burnt to death, and they proceeded on their journey.
At last, they came to a fine palace by a river, where a
gentleman of a thriving appearance was rolling out at the
gate in a very neat chariot, drawn by a pair of blood horses,
with two servants up behind in fine purple liveries.
'Bless my soul !' cried this gentleman, checking his coach-
man, and looking hard at the wild man, 'what monster have
we here !'
Then the very fine gentleman explained that it was a
hardened creature with whom Providence was very much
incensed ; in proof of which, here he was, rebuked, crippled,
handcuffed, starved, with his brother burnt to death in a
locked-up house, and the key of the house going round the
world.
'Are you Providence?' asked the wild man, faintly.
'Hold your tongue, sir,' said the very fine gentleman.
'Are you?' asked the wild man of the gentleman of the
palace.
The gentleman of the palace made no reply ; but, coming
out of his carriage in a brisk business-like manner, immedi-
ately put the wild man into a strait-waistcoat, and said to the
very fine gentleman, 'He shall fast for his sins.'
'I have already done that,' the wild man protested weakly.
'He shall do it again,' said the gentleman of the palace.
'I have fasted from work too, through divers causes — you
know I speak the truth — until I am miserably poor,' said
the wild man.
'He shall do it again,' said the gentleman of the palace.
'A day's work just now, is the breath of my life,' said the
wild man.
'He shall do without the breath of his life,' said the gentle-
man of the palace.
Therewith, they carried him off to a hard bench, and sat
him down, and discoursed to him ding-dong, through and
through the dictionary, about all manner of businesses except
the business that concerned him. And when they saw his
thoughts, red-eyed and angry though he was, escape from
them up to the true Providence far away, and when they
30 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
saw that he confusedly humbled and quieted his mind before
Heaven, in his innate desire to approach it and learn from it,
and know better how to bear these things and set them
right, they said 'He is listening to us, he is doing as we
would have him, he would never be troublesome.'
What that wild man really had before him in his thoughts,
at that time of being so misconstrued and so practised on,
History shall tell — not the narrator of this story, though he
knows full well. Enough for us, and for the present pur-
pose, that this tale can have no application — how were that
possible! — to the year one thousand eight hundred and
fifty-five.
THE THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS
[APEIL fcl, 1855]
EVERYBODY is acquainted with that enchanting collection of
stories, the Thousand and One Nights, better known in Eng-
land as the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Most people
know that these wonderful fancies are unquestionably of
genuine Eastern origin, and are to be found in Arabic manu-
scripts now existing in the Vatican, in Paris, in London and
in Oxford; the last-named city being particularly dis-
tinguished in this connection, as possessing, in the library of
Christchurch, a manuscript of the never-to-be-forgotten
Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.
The civilised world is indebted to France for a vast amount
of its possessions, and among the rest for the first opening to
Europe of this gorgeous storehouse of Eastern riches. So
well did M. Galland, the original translator, perform his task,
that when Mr. Wortley Montague brought home the manu-
script now in the Bodleian Library, there was found (poeti-
cal quotations excepted), to be very little, and that of a very
inferior kind, to add to what M. Galland had already made
perfectlv familiar to France and England.
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 31
Thus much as to the Thousand and One Nights, we recall,
by way of introduction to the discovery we are about to
announce.
There has lately fallen into our hands, a manuscript in
the Arabic Character (with which we are perfectly
acquainted), containing a variety of stories extremely similar
in structure and incident to the Thousand and One Nights ;
but presenting the strange feature that although they are
evidently of ancient origin, they have a curious accidental
bearing on the present time. Allowing for the difference of
manners and customs, it would often seem — -were it not for
the manifest impossibility of such prophetic knowledge in
any mere man or men — that they were written expressly with
an eye to events of the current age. We have referred the
manuscript (which may be seen at our office on the first day of
April in every year, at precisely four o'clock in the morn-
ing), to the profoundest Oriental Scholars of England and
France, who are no less sensible than we are ourselves of this
remarkable coincidence, and are equally at a loss to account
for it. They are agreed, we may observe, on the propriety
of our rendering the title in the words, The Thousand and
One Humbugs. For, although the Eastern story-tellers do
not appear to have possessed any word, or combination of
parts of words, precisely answering to the modern English
Humbug (which, indeed, they expressed by the figurative
phrase, A Camel made of sand), there is no doubt that they
were conversant with so common a thing, and further that the
thing was expressly meant to be designated in the general
title of the Arabic manuscript now before us. Dispensing
with further explanation, we at once commence the speci-
mens we shall occasionally present, of this literary curiosity.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
Among the ancient Kings of Persia who extended their
glorious conquests into the Indies, and far beyond the famous
River Ganges, even to the limits of China, Taxedtaurus (or
Fleeced Bull) was incomparably the most renowned. He was
so rich that he scorned to undertake the humblest enterprise
32 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
without inaugurating it by ordering his Treasurers to throw
several millions of pieces of gold into the dirt. For the same
reason he attached no value to his foreign possessions, but
merely used them as playthings for a little while, and then
always threw them away or lost them.
This wise Sultan, though blessed with innumerable sources
of happiness, was afflicted with one fruitful cause of discon-
tent. He had been married many scores of times, yet had
never found a wife to suit him. Although he had raised to
the dignity of Howsa Kummauns * (or Peerless Chatterer),
a great variety of beautiful creatures, not only of the lineage
of the high nobles of his court, but also selected from other
classes of his subjects, the result had uniformly been the
same. They proved unfaithful, brazen, talkative, idle, ex-
travagant, inefficient, and boastful. Thus it naturally hap-
pened that a Howsa Kummauns very rarely died a natural
death, but was generally cut short in some violent manner.
At length, the young and lovely Reefawm (that is to say
Light of Reason), the youngest and fairest of all the Sultan's
wives, and to whom he had looked with hope to recompense
him for his many disappointments, made as bad a Howsa
Kummauns as any of the rest. The unfortunate Taxed-
taurus took this so much to heart that he fell into a profound
melancholy, secluded himself from observation, and for some
time was so seldom seen or heard of that many of his great
officers of state supposed him to be dead.
Shall I never, said the unhappy Monarch, beating his breast
in his retirement in the Pavilion of Failure, and giving vent
to his tears, find a Howsa Kummauns, who will be true to me !
He then quoted from the Poet, certain verses importing,
Every Howsa Kummauns has deceived me, Every Howsa
Kummauns is a Humbug, I must slay the present Howsa
Kummauns as I have slain so many others, I am brought to
shame and mortification, I am despised by the world. After
which his grief so overpowered him, that he fainted away.
It happened that on recovering his senses he heard the voice
of the last-made Howsa Kummauns, in the Divan adjoining.
i Sounded like House o' Commons.
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 33
Applying his ear to the lattice, and finding that that shame-
less Princess was vaunting her loyalty and virtue, and denying
a host of facts — which she always did, all night — the Sultan
drew his scimetar in a fury, resolved to put an end to her ex-
istence.
But, the Grand Vizier Parmarstoon (or Twirling Weather-
cock), who was at that moment watching his incensed master
from behind the silken curtains of the Pavilion of failure,
hurried forward and prostrated himself, trembling on the
ground. This Vizier had newly succeeded to Abaddeen (or
the Addled), who had for his misdeeds been strangled with
a garter.
The breath of the slave, said the Vizier, is in the hands of
his Lord, but the Lion will sometimes deign to listen to the
croaking of the frog. I swear to thee, Vizier, replied the
Sultan, that I have borne too much already and will bear no
more. Thou and the Howsa Kumrnauns are in one story, and
by the might of Allah and the beard of the Prophet, I have
a mind to destroy ye both !
When the Vizier heard the Sultan thus menace him with
destruction, his heart drooped within him. But, being a brisk
and ready man, though stricken in years, he quoted certain
lines from the Poet, implying that the thunder-cloud often
spares the leaf or there would be no fruit, and touched the
ground with his forehead in token of submission. What
wouldst thou say? demanded the generous Prince, I give thee
leave to speak. Thou art not unaccustomed to public
speaking ; speak glibly ! Sire, returned the Vizier, but for the
dread of the might of my Lord, I would reply in the words
addressed by the ignorant man to the Genie. And what were
those words ? demanded the Sultan. Repeat them ! Parmars-
toon replied, To hear is to obey:
THE STORY OF THE IGNORANT MAN AND THE GENIE
Sire, on the barbarous confines of the kingdom of the Tar-
tars, there dwelt an ignorant man, who was obliged to make a
journey through the Great Desert of Desolation; which, as
your Majesty knows, is sometimes a journey of upwards of
34
three score and ten years. He bade adieu to his mother very
early in the morning, and departed without a guide, ragged,
barefoot, and alone. He found the way surprisingly steep
and rugged, and beset by vile serpents and strange unintelligi-
ble creatures of horrible shapes. It was likewise full of
black bogs and pits, into which he not only fell himself, but
often had the misfortune to drag other travellers whom he
encountered, and who got out no more, but were miserably
stifled.
Sire, on the fourteenth day of the journey of the ignorant
man of the kingdom of the Tartars, he sat down to rest by
the side of a foul well (being unable to find a better), and there
cracked for a repast, as he best could, a very hard nut, which
was all he had about him. He threw the shell anywhere as he
stripped it off, and having made an end of his meal arose to
wander on again, when suddenly the air was darkened, he heard
a frightful cry, and saw a monstrous Genie, of gigantic
stature, who brandished a mighty scimetar in a hand of
iron, advancing towards him. Rise, ignorant beast, said
the monster, as he drew nigh, that I, Law, may kill thee
for having affronted my ward. Alas, my lord, returned
the ignorant man, how can I have affronted thy ward
whom I never saw? He is invisible to thee, returned the
Genie, because thou art a benighted barbarian; but if thou
hadst ever learnt any good thing thou wouldst have seen him
plainly, and wouldst have respected him. Lord of my life,
pleaded the traveller, how could I learn where there were none
to teach me, and how affront thy ward whom I have not the
power to see? I tell thee, returned the Genie, that with thy
pernicious refuse thou hast struck my ward, Prince Socieetee,
in the apple of the eye ; and because thou hast done this, I
will be thy ruin. I maim and kill the like of thee by thou-
sands every year, for no other crime. And shall I spare thee?
Kneel and receive the blow.
Your Majesty will believe (continued the Grand Vizier)
that the ignorant man of the kingdom of the Tartars, gave
himself up for lost when he heard those cruel words. Without
so much as repeating the formula of our faith — There is but
one Allah, from him we come, to him we must return, and who
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 35
shall resist his will (for he was too ignorant even to have
heard it) — he bent his neck to receive the fatal stroke. His
head rolled off as he finished saying these words : Dread Law,
if thou hadst taken half the pains to teach me to discern thy
ward that thou hast taken to avenge him, thou hadst been
spared the great account to which I summon thee !
Taxedtaurus the Sultan of Persia listened attentively to
this recital on the part of his Grand Vizier, and when it was
concluded said, with a threatening brow, Expound to me, O
nephew of a dog ! the points of resemblance between the Tiger
and the Nightingale, and what thy ignorant man of the
accursed kingdom of the Tartars has to do with the false
Howsa Kummauns and the glib Vizier Parmarstoon? While
speaking he again raised his glittering scimetar. Let not my
master sully the sole of his foot by crushing an insect,
returned the Vizier, kissing the ground seven times, I meant
but to offer up a petition from the dust, that the Light of
the eyes of the Faithful would, before striking, deign to hear
my daughter. What of thy daughter? said the Sultan im-
patiently, and why should I hear thy daughter any more than
the daughter of the dirtiest of the dustmen? Sire, returned
the Vizier, I am dirtier than the dirtiest of the dustmen in
your Majesty's sight, but my daughter is deeply read in the
history of every Howsa Kummauns who has aspired to your
Majesty's favour during many years, and if your Majesty
would condescend to hear some of the Legends she has to
relate, they might — What dost thou call thy daughter? de-
manded the Sultan, interrupting. Hansardadade, replied the
Vizier. Go, said the Sultan, bring her hither. I spare thy
life until thou shalt return.
The Grand Vizier Parmarstoon, on receiving the injunction
to bring his daughter Hansardadade into the royal presence,
lost no time in repairing to his palace which was but across the
Sultan's gardens, and going straight to the women's apart-
ments, found Hansardadade surrounded by a number of old
women who were all consulting her at once. In truth, this
affable Princess was perpetually being referred to, by all man-
ner of old women. Hastily causing her attendants, when she
36
heard her father's errand, to attire her in her finest dress which
outsparkled the sun ; and bidding her young sister, Brothar-
toon (or Chamber Candlestick), to make similar preparations
and accompany her; the daughter of the Grand Vizier soon
covered herself with a rich veil, and said to her father, with
a low obeisance, Sir, I am ready to attend you, to my Lord,
the Commander of the Faithful.
The Grand Vizier, and his daughter Hansardadade, and her
young sister Brothartoon, preceded by Mistaspeeka, a black
mute, the Chief of the officers of the r6yal Seraglio, went
across the Sultan's gardens by the way the Vizier had come,
and arriving at the Sultan's palace, found that monarch on
his throne surrounded by his principal counsellors and officers
of state. They all four prostrated themselves at a distance,
and waited the Sultan's pleasure. That gracious prince was
troubled in his mind when he commanded the fair Hansarda-
dade (who, on the whole, was very fair indeed), to approach,
for he had sworn an oath in the Vizier's absence from which
he could not depart. Nevertheless, as it must be kept, he pro-
ceeded to announce it before the assembly. Vizier, said he,
thou hast brought thy daughter here, as possessing a large
stock of Howsa Kummauns experience, in the hope of her
relating something that may soften me under my accumulated
wrongs. Know that I have solemnly sworn that if her stories
fail — as I believe they will — to mitigate my wrath, I will have
her burned and her ashes cast to the winds ! Also, I will
strangle thee and the present Howsa Kummauns, and will take
a new one every day and strangle her as soon as taken, until
I find a good and true one. Parmarstoon replied, To hear ies
to obey.
Hansardadade then took a one-stringed lute, and sang a
lengthened song in prose. Its purport was, I am the recorder
of brilliant eloquence, I am the chronicler of patriotism, I am
the pride of sages, and the joy of nations. The con-
tinued salvation of the country is owing to what I preserve,
and without it there would be no business done. Sweet are
the voices of the crow and chough, and Persia never never
never can have words enough. At the conclusion of this
delightful strain, the Sultan and the whole divan were so
37
faint with rapture that they remained in a comatose state for
seven hours.
Would your Majesty, said Hansardadade, when all were at
length recovered, prefer first to hear the story of the Won-
derful Camp, or the story of the Talkative Barber, or the
story of Scarli Tapa and the Forty Thieves? I would have
thee commence, replied the Sultan, with the story of the Forty
Thieves.
Hansardadade began, Sire, there was once a poor relation
— when Brothartoon interposed. Dear sister, cried Brothar-
toon, it is now past midnight, it will be shortly daybreak, and
if you are not asleep, you ought to be. I pray you, dear
sister, by all means to hold your tongue to-night, and if my
Lord the Sultap will suffer you to live another day, you can
talk to-morrow. The Sultan arose with a clouded face, but
went out without giving any orders for the execution.
II
[APRIL 28, 1855]
THE STORY OF SCARLI TAPA AND THE FORTY THIEVES
ACCOMPANIED by the Grand Vizier Parmarstoon, and the
black mute Mistaspeeka the chief of the Seraglio, Hansarda-
dade again repaired next day to the august presence, and,
after making the usual prostrations before the Sultan, began
thus:
Sire, there was once a poor relation who lived in a town in
the dominions of the Sultan of the Indies, and whose name
was Scarli Tapa. He was the youngest son of a Dowajah —
which, as your Majesty knows, is a female spirit of voracious
appetites, and generally with a wig and a carmine complexion,
who prowls about old houses and preys upon mankind. This
Dowajah had attained an immense age, in consequence of
having been put by an evil Genie on the PENSHUNLIST, or
talisman to secure long life; but, at length she very reluc-
tantly died towards the close of a quarter, after making the
most affecting struggles to live into the half-year.
38 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Scarli Tapa had a rich elder brother named Cashim, who
had married the daughter of a prosperous merchant, and lived
magnificently. Scarli Tapa, on the other hand, could barely
support his wife and family by lounging about the town and
going out to dinner with his utmost powers of perseverance,
betting on horse-races, playing at billiards, and running into
debt with everybody who would trust him — the last being his
principal means of obtaining an honest livelihood.
One day, when Scarli Tapa had strolled for some time along
the banks of a great river of liquid filth which ornamented
that agreeable country and rendered it salubrious, he found
himself in the neighbourhood of the Woods and Forests.
Lifting up his eyes, he observed in the distance a great cloud
of dust. He was not surprised to see it, knowing those parts
to be famous for casting prodigious quantities of dust into
the eyes of the Faithful ; but, as it rapidly advanced towards
him, he climbed into a tree, the better to observe it without
being seen himself.
As the cloud of dust approached, Scarli Tapa perceived it
from his hiding place to be occasioned by forty mounted rob-
bers, each bestriding a severely-goaded and heavily-laden Bull.
The whole troop came to a halt at the foot of the tree, and all
the robbers dismounted. Every robber then tethered his hack
to the most convenient shrub, gave it a full meal of very bad
chaff, and hung over his arm the empty sack which had con-
tained the same. Then the Captain of the Robbers, advanc-
ing to a door in an antediluvian rock, which Scarli Tapa had
not observed before, and on which were the enchanted letters
O. F. F. I. C. E., said, Debrett's Peerage. Open Sesame!
As soon as the Captain of the Robbers had uttered these
words, the door, obedient to the charm, flew open, and all the
robbers went in. The captain went in last, and the door shut
of itself.
The robbers stayed so long within the rock that Scarli Tapa
more than once felt tempted to descend the tree and make off.
Fearful, however, that they might reappear and catch him
before he could escape, he remained hidden by the leaves, as
patiently as he could. At last the door opened, and the forty
robbers came put. As the captain had gone in last, he came
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 39
out first, and stood to see the whole troop pass him. When
they had all done so, he said, Debrett's Peerage. Shut
Sesame ! The door immediately closed again as before !
Every robber then mounted his Bull, adjusting before him
his sack well filled with gold, silver, and jewels. When the
captain saw that they were all ready, he put himself at their
head, and they rode off by the way they had come.
Scarli Tapa remained in the tree until the receding cloud
of dust occasioned by the troop of robbers with their captain
at their head, was no longer visible, and then came softly
down and approached the door. Making use of the words
that he had heard pronounced by the Captain of the Robbers,
he said, after first piously strengthening himself with the
remembrance of his deceased mother the Dowajah, Debrett's
Peerage. Open Sesame ! The door instantly flew wide open.
Scarli Tapa, who had expected to see a dull place, was sur-
prised to find himself in an exceedingly agreeable vista of
rooms, where everything was as light as possible, and where
vast quantities of the finest wheaten loaves, and the richest
gold and silver fishes, and all kinds of valuable possessions,
were to be got for the laying hold of. Quickly loading him-
self with as much spoil as he could move under, he opened and
closed the door as the Captain of the Robbers had done, and
hurried away with his treasure to his poor home.
When the wife of Scarli Tapa saw her husband enter their
dwelling after it was dark, and proceed to pile upon the floor
a heap of wealth, she cried, Alas ! husband, whom have you
taken in now? Be not alarmed, wife, returned Scarli Tapa,
no one suffers but the public. e And then told her how he, a
poor relation, had made his way into Office by the magic
words and had enriched himself.
There being more money and more loaves and fishes than
they knew what to do with at the moment, the wife of Scarli
Tapa, transported with joy, ran off to her sister-in-law, the
wife of Cashim Tapa, who lived hard by, to borrow a Meas-
ure by means of which their property could be got into some
order. The wife of Cashim Tapa looking into the measure
when it was brought back, found at the bottom of it, several
of the crumbs of fine loaves and of the scales of gold and
40 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
silver fishes ; upon which, flying into an envious rage, she thus
addressed her husband : Wretched Cashim, you know you are
of high birth as the eldest son of a Dowajah, and you think
you are rich, but your despised younger brother, Scarli Tapa,
is infinitely richer and more powerful than you. Judge of his
wealth from these tokens. At the same time she showed him
the measure.
Cashim, who since his marriage to the merchant's widow,
had treated his brother coolly and held him at a distance, was
at once fired with a burning desire to know how he had become
rich. He was unable to sleep all night, and at the first streak
of day, before the summons to morning prayers was heard
from the minarets of the mosques, arose and went to his
brother's house. Dear Scarli Tapa, said he, pretending to be
very fraternal, what loaves and fishes are these that thou hast
in thy possession? Scarli Tapa perceiving from this dis-
course that he could no longer keep his secret, communicated
his discovery to his brother, who lost no time in providing all
things necessary for the stowage of riches, and in repairing
alone to the mysterious door near the Woods and Forests.
When night came, and Cashim Tapa did not return, his
relatives became uneasy. His absence being prolonged for
several days and nights, Scarli Tapa at length proceeded to
the enchanted door in search of him. Opening it by the in-
fallible means, what were his emotions to find that the rob-
bers had encountered his brother within, and had quartered
him upon the spot for ever !
Commander of the Faithful, when Scarli Tapa beheld the
dismal spectacle of his brother, everlastingly quartered upon
Office for having merely uttered the magic words, Debrett's
Peerage. Open Sesame ! he was greatly troubled in his mind.
Feeling the necessity of hushing the matter up, and putting
the best face upon it for the family credit, he at once devised
a plan to attain that object. There was, in the House where
his brother had sat himself down on his marriage with the
merchant's daughter, a discreet slave whose name was Job-
biana. Though a kind of under secretary in the treasury
department, she was very useful in the dirty work of the es-
tablishment, and had also some knowledge of the stables, and
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS H
could assist the whippers-in at a pinch. Scarli Tapa, going
home and taking the discreet slave aside, related to her how
her master was quartered, and how it was now their business
to disguise the fact, and deceive the neighbours. Jobbiana
replied, To hear is to obey.
Accordingly, before day — for she always avoided daylight
— the discreet slave went to a certain cobbler whom she knew,
and found him sitting in his stall in the public street. Good
morrow, friend, she said, putting a bribe into his hand, will
you bring the tools of your trade and come to a House with
me ? Willingly, but what to do ? replied the cobbler, who was
a merry fellow. Nothing against my patriotism and con-
science, I hope? (at which he laughed heartily). Not in the
least, returned Jobbiana, giving him another bribe. But, you
must go into the House blindfolded and with your hands tied ;
you don't mind that for a job? I don't mind anything for a
job, returned the cobbler with vivacity; I like a job. It is
my business to job; only make it worth my while, and I am
ready for any job you may please to name. At the same
time he arose briskly. Jobbiana then imparted to him the
quartering that had taken place, and that he was wanted to
cobble the subject up and hide what had been done. Is that
all? If it is no more than that, returned the cobbler, blind
my eyes and tie my hands, and let us cobble away as long as
you like !
Sire, the discreet slave blindfolded the cobbler, and tied his
hands, and took him to the House; where he cobbled the sub-
ject up with so much skill, that she rewarded him munificently.
We must now return to the Captain of the Robbers, whose
name was Yawyawah, and whose soul was filled with perplexi-
ties and anxieties, when he visited the cave and found, from
the state of the wheaten loaves and the gold and silver fishes,
that there was yet another person who possessed the secret
of the magic door.
Your majesty must know that Yawyawah, Captain of the
Robbers (most of whose forefathers had been rebellious Genii,
who never had had anything whatever to do with Solomon),
sauntering through the city, in a highly disconsolate and lan-
guid state, chanced to come before daylight upon the cobbler
42 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
working in his stall. Good morrow, honourable friend, said
he, you job early. My Lord, returned the cobbler, I job early
and late. You do well, observed the Captain of the Robbers ;
but, have you light enough? The less light the better, said
the cobbler, for my work. Ay ! returned Yawyawah ; why so ?
Why so ! repeated the cobbler, winking, because I can cobble
certain businesses, best, in the dark. When the Captain of
the Robbers heard him say this, he quickly understood the
hint. He blindfolded him, and tied his hands, as the discreet
slave had done, turned his coat, and led him away until he
stopped at the House. This is the House that was concerned
in the quartering and cobbling, said he. The captain set a
mark upon it. But, Jobbiana coming by soon afterwards, and
seeing what had been done, set exactly the same mark upon
twenty other Houses in the same row. So that in truth they
were all precisely alike, and one was marked by Jobbiana
exactly as another was, and there was not a pin to choose be-
tween them.
Thus discomfited, the Captain of the Robbers called his
troop together and addressed them. My noble, right hon-
ourable, honourable and gallant, honourable and learned, and
simply honourable, friends, said he, it is apparent that we,
the old band who for so many years have possessed the com-
mand of the magic door, are in danger of being superseded.
In a word, it is clear that there are now two bands of rob-
bers, and that we must overcome the opposition, or be our-
selves vanquished. All the robbers applauded this sentiment.
Therefore, said the captain, I will disguise myself as a trader
— in the patriotic line of business — and will endeavour to
prevail by stratagem. The robbers as with one voice ap-
proved of this design.
The Captain of the Robbers accordingly disguised himself
as a trader of that sort which is called at the bazaars a patriot,
and, having again had recourse to the cobbler, and having
carefully observed the House, arranged his plans without de-
lay. Feigning to be a dealer in soft-soap, he concealed his
men in nine-and-thirty jars of that commodity, a man in every
jar; and, loading a number of mules with this pretended
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 43
merchandise, appeared at the head of his caravan one even-
ing at the House, where Scarli Tapa was sitting on a bench
in his usual place, taking it (as he generally did in the
House) very coolly. My Lord, said the pretended trader, I
am a stranger here, and know not where to bestow my mer-
chandise for the night. Suffer me then, I beseech you, to
warehouse it here. Scarli Tapa rose up, showed the pre-
tended merchant where to put his goods, and instructed Job-
biana to prepare an entertainment for his guest. Also a bath
for himself; his hands being very far from clean.
The discreet slave, in obedience to her orders, proceeded to
prepare the entertainment and the bath; but was vexed to
discover, when it was late and the shops of the dealers were
all shut, that there was no soft-soap in the House — which was
the more unexpected, as there was generally more than enough.
Remembering, however, that the pretended trader had brought
a large stock with him, she went to one of the jars to get a
little. As she drew near to it, the impatient robber within,
supposing it to be his leader, said in a low voice, — Is it time
for our party to come in? Jobbiana, instantly comprehend-
ing the danger, replied, Not yet, but presently. She went in
this manner to all the jars, receiving the same question, and
giving the same answer.
The discreet slave returned into the kitchen, with her pres-
ence of mind not at all disturbed, and there prepared a luke-
warm mess of soothing syrup, worn-out wigs, weak milk and
water, poppy-heads, empty nut-shells, froth, and other simi-
lar ingredients. When it was sufficiently mawkish, she re-
turned to the jars, bearing a large kettle filled with this mix-
ture, poured some of it upon every robber, and threw the
whole troop into a state of insensibility or submission. She
then returned to the House, served up the entertainment,
cleared away the fragments, and attired herself in a rich dress
to dance before her master and his disguised visitor.
In the course of her dances, which were performed in the
slowest time, and during which she blew both her own and
the family trumpet with extraordinary pertinacity, Jobbiana
took care always to approach nearer and still nearer to the
44 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Captain of the Robbers. At length she seized him by the
sleeve of his disguise, disclosed him in his own dress to her
master, and related where his men were, and how they had
asked Was it time to come in? Scarli Tapa, so far from
being angry with the pretended trader, fell upon his neck
and addressed him in these friendly expressions: Since our
object is the same and no great difference exists between us,
O my brother, let us form a Coalition. Debrett's Peerage
will open Sesame to the Scarli Tapas and the Yawyawahs
equally, and will shut out the rest of mankind. Let it be so.
There is plunder enough in the cave. So that it is never re-
stored to the original owners and never gets into other hands
but ours, why should we quarrel overmuch ! The Captain
made a suitable reply and embraced his entertainer. Jobbiana,
shedding tears of joy, embraced them both.
Shortly afterwards, Scarli Tapa in gratitude to the wise
Jobbiana, caused her to be invested: with the freedom of the
City — where she had been very much beloved for many years
— and gave her in marriage to his own son. They had a large
family and a powerful number of relations, who all inherited,
by right of relationship, the power of opening Sesame and
shutting it tight. The Yawyawahs became a very numerous
tribe also, and exercised the same privilege. This, Comman-
der of the Faithful, is the reason why, in that distant part of
the dominions of the Sultan of the Indies, all true believers
kiss the ground seven hundred and seventy-seven times on
hearing the magic words, Debrett's Peerage — why the talis-
man of Office is always possessed in common by the three great
races of the Scarli Tapas, the Yawyawahs, and the Jobbianas
— why the public affairs, great and small, and all the national
enterprises both by land and sea are conducted on a system
which is the highest peak of the mountain of justice, and
which always succeeds — why the people of that country are
serenely satisfied with themselves and things in general, are
unquestionably the envy of surrounding nations, and cannot
fail in the inevitable order of events to flourish to the end of
the world — why all these great truths are incontrovertible, and
why all who dispute them receive the bastinado as atheists and
rebels.
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 45
Here, Hansardadade concluded the story of the Forty
Thieves, and said, If my Lord the Sultan will deign to hear
another narrative from the lips of the lowest of his servants,
I have adventures yet more surprising than these to relate:
adventures that are worthy to be written in letters of gold.
By Allah ! exclaimed the Sultan, whose hand had been upon
his scimetar several times during the previous recital, and
whose eyes had menaced Pamarstoon until the soul of that
Vizier had turned to water, what thou hast told but now, de-
serves to be recorded in letters of Brass !
Hansardadade was proceeding, Sire, in the great plain at
the feet of the mountains of Casgar, which is seven weeks'
journey across — when Brotharton interrupted her: Sister, it
is nearly daybreak, and if you are not asleep you ought to be.
I pray you, dear sister, tell us at present no more of those
stories that you know so well, but hold your tongue and go to
bed. Hansardadade was silent, and the Sultan arose in a very
indifferent humour and gloomily walked out — an great doubt
whether he would let her live, on any consideration, over an-
other day.
Ill
[MAY 5, 1855]
ON the following night, Hansardadade proceeded with:
THE STORY OF THE TALKATIVE BARBER
In the great plain which lies at the feet of the mountains
of Casgar, and which is seven weeks' journey across, there is
a city where a lame young man was once invited, with other
guests, to an entertainment. Upon his entrance, the company
already assembled rose up to do him honour, and the host
taking him by the hand invited him to sit down with the
rest upon the estrade. At the same time the master of the
house greeted his visitor with the salutation, Allah is Allah,
there is no Allah but Allah, may his name be praised, and
may Allah be with you !
46 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Sire, the lame young man, who had the appearance of one
that had suffered much, was about to comply with the invita-
tion of the master of the house to seat himself upon the estrade
with the rest of the company, when he suddenly perceived
among them a Barber. He instantly flew back with every
token of abhorrence, and made towards the door. The
master of the house, amazed at this behaviour, stopped him.
Sir, exclaimed the young man, I adjure you by Mecca, do
not stop me, let me go. I cannot without horror look upon
that abominable Barber. Upon him and upon the whole
of his relations be the curse of Allah, in return for all I have
endured from his intolerable levity, and from his talk never
being to the point or purpose ! With these words, the lame
young man again made violently towards the door. The
guests were astonished at this behaviour, and began to have a
very bad opinion of the Barber.
The master of the house so courteously entreated the lame
young man to recount to the company the causes of this
strong dislike, that at length he could not refuse. Averting
his head so that he might not see the Barber, he proceeded.
Gentlemen, you must know that this accursed Barber is the
cause of my being crippled, and is the occasion of all my mis-
fortunes. I became acquainted with him in the following
manner.
I am called Publeck, or The Many Headed. I am one of a
large family, who have undergone an infinite variety of ad-
ventures and afflictions. One day, I chanced to sit down to
rest on a seat in a narrow lane, when a lattice over against
me opened, and I obtained a glimpse of the most ravishing
Beauty in the world. After watering a pot of budding
flowers which stood in the window, she perceived me and
modestly withdrew ; but, not before she had directed towards
me a glance so full of charms, that I screamed aloud with love
and became insensible for a considerable time.
When I came to myself, I directed a favourite slave to make
enquiries among the neighbours, and, on pain of death, to
bring me an exact account of the young lady's family and
condition. The slave acquitted himself so well, that he in-
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 47
formed me within an hour that the young lady's name was
Fair Guvawnment, and that she was the daughter of the chief
Cadi. The violence of my passion became so great that I
took to my bed that evening, fell into a fever, and was reduced
to the brink of death, when an old lady of my acquaintance
came to see me. Son, said she, after observing me atten-
tively, I perceive that your disease is love. Inform me who
is the object of your affections, and rely upon me to bring you
together. This address of the good old lady's had such an
effect upon me, that I immediately arose quite restored in
health, and began to dress myself.
In a word (continued the lame young man, addressing the
company assembled in the house of the citizen of the plain at
the feet of the mountains of Casgar, and always keeping his
head in such a position as that he could not see the Barber),
the old lady exerted herself in my behalf with such effect, that
on the very next day she returned, commissioned by the en-
chantress of my soul to appoint a meeting between us. I
arranged to attire myself in my richest clothes, and dispatched
the same favourite slave with instructions to fetch a Barber,
who knew his business, and who could skilfully prepare me for
the interview I was to have, for the first time in all my life,
with Fair Guvawnment. Gentlemen, the slave returned with
the wretch whom you see here.
Sir, began this accursed Barber whom a malignant destiny
thus inflicted on me, how do you do, I hope you are pretty
well. I do not wish to praise myself, but you are lucky to
have sent for me. My name is Praymiah. In me you behold
an accomplished diplomatist, a first-rate statesman, a frisky
speaker, an easy shaver, a touch-and-go joker, a giver of the
go-by to all complainers, and above all a member of the
aristocracy of Barbers. Sir, I am a lineal descendant of the
Prophet, and consequently a born Barber. All my relations,
friends, acquaintances, connexions, and associates, are likewise
lineal descendants of the Prophet, and consequently born Bar-
bers every one. As I said, but the other day, to Layardeen,
or the Troublesome, the aristocracy — May Allah confound
thy aristocracy and thee ! cried I, will you begin to shave me ?
48 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Gentlemen (proceeded the lame young man), the Barber
had brought a showy case with him, and he consumed such
an immense time in pretending to open it, that I was well nigh
fretted to death. I will not be shaved at all, said I. Sir, re-
turned the unabashed Barber, you sent for me to shave you,
and with your pardon I will do it, whether you like it or not.
Ah, Sir ! you have not so good an opinion of me as your father
had. I knew your father, and he appreciated me. I said a
thousand pleasant things to him, and rendered him a thousand
services, and he adored me. Just Heaven, he would exclaim,
you are an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom, no man can
plumb the depth of your profundity ! My dear Sir, I would
reply, you do me more honour than I deserve. Still, as a
lineal descendant of the Prophet, and .one of the aristocracy
of born Barbers, I will, with the help of Allah, shave you
pretty close before I have done with you.
You may guess, gentlemen, in my state of expectancy, with
my heart set on Fair Guvawnment, and the precious time run-
ning by, how I cursed this impertinent chattering on the part-
of the Barber. Barber of mischief, Barber of sin, Barber of
false pretence, Barber of froth and bubble, said I, stamping
my foot upon the ground, will you begin to do your work?
Fair and softly, Sir, said he, let me count you out first. With
that, he counted from one up to thirty-eight with great de-
liberation, and then laughed heartily and went out to look at
the weather.
When the Barber returned, he went on prattling as before.
You are in high feather, Sir, said he. I am glad to see you
look so well. But, how can you be otherwise than flourishing,
after having sent for me! I am called the Careless. I am
not like Dizzee, who draws blood ; nor like Darbee, who claps
on blisters ; nor like Johnnee, who works with the square and
rule ; I am the easy shaver, and I care for nobody, I can do
anything. Shall I dance the dance of Mistapit to please you,
or shall I sing the song of Mistafoks, or joke the joke of
Jomillah? Honour me with your attention while I do all
three.
The Barber (continued the lame young man, with a groan),
danced the dance of Mistapit, and sang the song of Mista
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 49
foks, and joked the joke of Jomillah, and then began with
fresh impertinences. Sir, said he, with a lofty flourish, when
Britteen first at Heaven's command, arose from out the azure
main, this was the charter of the land, and guardian angels
sang this strain : Singing, as First Lord was a wallerking
the Office-garding around, no end of born Barbers he picked
up and found, Says he I will load them with silvier and gold,
for the country 's a donkey, and as such is sold. — At this point
I could bear his insolence no longer, but starting up, cried,
Barber of hollowness, by what consideration am I restrained
from falling upon and strangling thee? Calmly, Sir, said he,
let me count you out first. He then played his former game
of counting from one to under forty, and again laughed
heartily, and went out to take the height of the sun, and
make a calculation of the state of the wind, that he might
know whether it was an auspicious time to begin to shave me.
I took the opportunity (said the young man) of flying
from my house so darkened by the fatal presence of this de-
testable Barber, and of repairing with my utmost speed to the
house of the Cadi. But, the appointed hour was long past,
and Fair Guvawnment had withdrawn no one knew whither.
As I stood in the street cursing my evil destiny and execrating
this intolerable Barber, I heard a hue and cry. Looking in
the direction whence it came, I saw the diabolical Barber,
attended by an immense troop of his relations and friends,
the lineal descendants of the Prophet and aristocracy of born
Barbers, all offering a reward to any one who would stop me,
and all proclaiming the unhappy Publeek to be their natural
prey and rightful property. I turned and fled. They
jostled and bruised me cruelly among them, and I became
maimed, as you see. I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure
this Barber, and ever since and evermore I totally renounce
him. With these concluding words, the lame young man arose
in a sullen way that had something very threatening in it, and
left the company.
Commander of the Faithful, when the lame young man was
gone, the guests, turning to the Barber, who wore his turban
very much on one side and smiled complacently, asked him
what he had to say for himself? The Barber immediately
50 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
danced the dance of Mistapit, and sang the song of Mistafoks,
and joked the joke of Jomillah. Gentlemen, said he, not at
all out of breath after these performances, it is true that I
am called the Careless ; permit me to recount to you, as a lively
diversion, what happened to a twin-brother of that young man
who has so undeservedly abused me, in connexion with a near
relation of mine. No one objecting, the Barber related:
THE STOKY OF THE BARMECIDE FEAST
The young man's twin-brother, Guld Publeek, was in very
poor circumstances and hardly knew how to live. In his re-
duced condition he was fain to go about to great men, begging
them to take him in — and to do them justice, they did it
extensively.
One day in the course of his poverty-stricken wanderings,
he came to a large house with two high towers, a spacious hall,
and abundance of fine gilding, statuary, and painting.
Although the house was far from finished, he could see enough
to assure him that enormous sums of money must be lavished
upon it. He inquired who was the master of this wealthy
mansion, and received for information that he was a certain,
Barmecide. (The Barmecide, gentlemen, is my near relation,
and, like myself, a lineal descendant of the Prophet, and a
born Barber. )
The young man's twin brother passed through the gate~
way and crept submissively onward, until he came into a spaci-
ous apartment, where he descried the Barmecide sitting at the
upper end in the post of honour. The Barmecide asked the
young man's brother what he wanted? My Lord, replied he,
in a pitiful tone, I am sore distressed, and have none but high
and mighty nobles like yourself, to help me. That much at
least is true, returned the Barmecide, there is no help save in
high and mighty nobles, it is the appointment of Allah. But,
what is your distress? My Lord, said the young man's
brother, I am fasting from all the nourishment I want, and
— whatever you may please to think — am in a dangerous
extremity. A very little more at any moment, and you would
be astonished at the figure I should make. Is it so, indeed?
THOUSAND AND ONE HUMBUGS 51
inquired the Barmecide, Sir, returned the young man's
brother, I swear by Heaven and Earth that it is so, and
Heaven and Earth are every hour drawing nearer to the dis~
covery that it is so. Alas, poor man ! replied the Barmecide,
pretending to have an interest in him. Ho, boy ! Bring us
of the best here, and let us not spare our liberal measures.
This poor man shall make good cheer without delay.
Though no boy appeared, gentlemen, and though there was
no sign of the liberal measures of which the Barmecide spoke
so ostentatiously, the young man's brother, Guld Publeek, en-
deavoured to fall in with the Barmecide's humour. Come!
cried the Barmecide, feigning to pour water on his hands, let
us begin fair and fresh. How do you like this purity? Ah,
my Lord, returned Guld Publeek, imitating the Barmecide's
action, this is indeed purity : this is in truth a delicious begin-
ing. Then let us proceed, said the Barmecide, seeming to
dry his hands, with this smoking dish of Reefawm. How do
you like it? At the same time he pretended to hand choice
morsels to the young man's brother. Take your fill of it,
exclaimed the Barmecide, there is plenty here, do not spare it,
it was cooked for you. May Allah prolong your life, my
Lord, said Guld Publeek, you are liberal indeed!
The Barmecide having boasted in this pleasant way of his
smoking dish of Reefawn, which had no existence, affected to
call for another dish. Ho ! cried he, clapping his hands, bring
in those Educational Kabobs. Then, he imitated the action of
putting some upon the plate of the young man's brother,
and went on. How do you like these Educational Kabobs?
The cook who made them is a treasure. Are they not
justly seasoned? Are they not so honestly made, as to
be adapted to all digestions? You want them very much,
I know, and have wanted them this long time. Do you
enjoy them? And here is ft delicious mess, called Foreen
Leejun. Eat of it also, for I pride myself upon it,
and expect it to bring me great respect and much friend-
ship from distant lands. And this pillau of Church-en-
dowments-and-duties, which you see so beautifully divided,
pray how do you approve of this pillau? It was in-
vented on your account, and no expense has been spared to
52 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
render it to your taste. Ho, boy, bring in that ragout !
Now here, my friend, is a ragout, called Law-of-Partnership.
It is expressly made for poor men's eating, and I particularly
pride myself upon it. This is indeed a dish at which you may
cut and come again. And boy ! hasten to set before my good
friend, Guld Publeek, the rare stew of colonial spices,
minced crime, hashed poverty, swollen liver of ignorance,
stale confusion, rotten tape, and chopped-up bombast, steeped
in official sauce, and garnished with a great deal of tongue and
a very little brains — the crowning dish, of which my dear
friend never can have enough, and upon which he thrives so
well! But, you don't eat with an appetite, my brother, said
the Barmecide. I fear the repast is hardly to your liking?
Pardon me, my benefactor, returned the guest, whose jaws
ached with pretending to eat, I am full almost to the throat.
Well then, said the Barmecide, since you have dined so well,
try the dessert. Here are apples of discord from the Horse
Guards and Admiralty, here is abundance of the famous fruit
from the Dead Sea that turns to ashes on the lips, here are
dates from the Peninsula in great profusion, and here is a fig
for the nation. Eat and be happy ! My Lord, replied the
object of his merriment, I am quite worn out by your liber-
ality, and can bear no more.
Gentlemen (continued the loquacious Barber), when the
numerous Barmecide, my near relation lineally descended
from the Prophet, had brought his guest to this pass, he clap-
ped his hands three times to summon around him his slaves, and
instructed them to force in reality the vile stew of which he
had spoken down the throat of the hungry Guld Publeek, to-
gether with a nauseous mess called DUBLINCUMTAX, and to put
bitters in his drink, strew dust on his head, blacken his face,
shave his eyebrows, pluck away his beard, insult him and make
merry with him. He then caused him to be attired in a shame-
ful dress and set upon an ass with his face to the tail, and in
this state to be publicly exposed with the inscription round
his neck, This is the punishment of Guld Publeek who asked
for nourishment and said he wanted it. Such is the present
droll condition of this person ; while my near relation, the Bar-
mecide, sits in the post of honour with his turban very much
THE TOADY TREE 53
on one side, enjoying the joke. Which I think you will all
admit is an excellent one.
Hansardadade having made an end of the discourse of the
loquacious Barber, would have instantly begun another story,
had not Brothartoon shut her up with, Dear Sister, it will be
shortly daybreak. Get to bed and be quiet.
THE TOADY TREE
IT is not a new remark, that any real and true change for the
public benefit, must derive its vitality from the practice of con-
sistent people. Whatever may be accepted as the meaning of
the adage, Charity begins at home — which for the most part
has very little meaning that I could ever discover — it is pretty
clear that Reform begins at home. If I had the lungs of Her-
cules and the eloquence of Cicero, and devoted them at any
number of monster-meetings to a cause which I deserted in my
daily life whensoever the opportunity of desertion was pre-
sented to me (say on an average fifty times a day), I had far
better keep my lungs and my eloquence to myself, and at all
times and seasons leave that cause alone.
The humble opinion of the present age is, that no privileged
class should have an inheritance in the administration of the
public affairs, and that a system which fails to enlist in the
service of the country, the greatest fitness and merit that the
country produces, must have in it something inherently wrong.
It might be supposed, the year One having been for some time
in the calendar of the past, that this is on the whole a moderate
and reasonable opinion — not very far in advance of the
period, or of any period, and involving no particularly un-
christian revenge for a great national breakdown. Yet, to
the governing class in the main, the sentiment is altogether
so novel and extraordinary, that we may observe it to be re-
ceived as an incomprehensible and incredible thing. I have
been seriously asking myself, whose fault is this? I have
54 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
come to the conclusion that it is the fault of the over-cultiva-
tion of the great Toady Tree; the tree of many branches,
which grows to an immense height in England, and which
orershadows all the land.
My name is Cobbs, Why do I, Cobbs, love to sit like a
Patriarch, in the shade, of my Toady Tree 1 What have I to
do with it? What comfort do I derive from it, what fruit
of self-respect does it yield to me, what beauty is there in it?
To lure me to a Public Dinner, why must I have a Lord in
the chair? To gain me to a Subscription-list, why do I need
fifty Barons, Marquises, Viscounts, Dukes, and Baronets, at
the head of it, in larger type and longer lines than the com-
monalty? If I don't want to be perpetually decorated with
these boughs from the Toady Tree— if it be my friend Dobbs,
and not I, Cobbs, in whose ready button-hole such appliances
are always stuck—why don't I myself quietly and good-
humouredly renounce them? Why not! Because I will be
always gardening, more or less, at the foot of the Toady Tree.
Take Dobbs. Dobbs is a well-read man, an earnest man, a
man of strong ajad sincere convictions, a man who would be
deeply wounded if I told him he was not a true Administrative
Reformer iu the best sense of the word. When Dobbs talks to
me about the House of Commons, (and lets off upon me those
little revolvers of special official intelligence which he always
carries, ready loaded and capped), why does he adopt the
Lobby slang: with which he has as much to do as with any
dialect in the heart of Africa? Why must he speak of Mr.
Fizmaili as 'Fizzy,' and of Lord Gambaroon as 'Gam'? How
comes it that he is acquainted with the intentions of the Cabi-
net six weeks beforehand — often, indeed, so long beforehand
that I shall infallibly die before there is the least sign of their
having ever existed? Dobbs is perfectly clear in his genera-
tion that men are to be deferred to for their capacity for
what they undertake, for their talents and worth, and for
nothing else. Aye, aye, I know he is. But, I have seen
Dobbs dive and double about that Royal Academy Exhibition,
in pursuit of a nobleman, in a marvellously small way. I
have stood with Dobbs examining a picture, when the Marquis
has entered, and I have known of the Marquis's entrance
55
without lifting my eyes or turning my head, solely by the
increased gentility in the audible tones of Dobbs's critical
observations. And then, the Marquis approaching, Dobbs has
talked to me as his lay figure, at and for the Marquis, until
the Marquis has said, 'Ha, Dobbs?' and Dobbs, with his face
folded into creases of deference, has piloted that illustrious
nobleman away, to the contemplation of some pictorial subtle-
ties of his own discovery. Now, Dobbs has been troubled and
abashed in all this ; Dobbs's Voice, face, and manner, with a
stubbornness far beyond his control, have revealed his uneasi-
ness ; Dobbs, leading the noble Marquis away, has shown me
in the expression of his very shoulders that he knew I laughed
at him, and that he knew he deserved it ; and yet Dobbs could
not for his life resist the shadow of the Toady Tree, and
come out into the natural air !
The other day, walking down Piccadilly from Hyde Park
Corner, I overtook Hobbs. Hobbs had two relations starved
to death with needless hunger and cold before Sebastopol, and
one killed by mistake in the hospital at Scutari. Hobbs him-
self had the misfortune, about fifteen years ago, to invent a
very ingenious piece of mechanism highly important to dock-
yards, which has detained him unavailingly in the waiting-
rooms of public offices ever since, and which was invented last
month by somebody else in France, and immediately adopted
there. Hobbs had been one of the public at Mr. Roebuck's
committee, the very day I overtook him, and was burning with
indignation at what he had heard. 'This Gordian knot of red
tape,' said Hobbs, 'must be cut. All things considered, there
never was a people so abused as the English at this time, and
there never was a country brought to such a pass. It will
not bear thinking of — (Lord Joddle).' The parenthesis re-
ferred to a passing carriage, which Hobbs turned and looked
after with the greatest interest. 'The system,' he continued,
'must be totally changed. We must have the right man in the
right place (Duke of Twaddleton on horseback), and only
capability and not family connexions placed in office (brother-
in law of the Bishop of Gorhambury). We must not put
our trust in mere idols (how do you do! — Lady Coldveal —
little too highly painted, but fine woman for her years), and
56 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
we must get rid as a nation of our ruinous gentility and defer-
ence to mere rank. (Thank you, Lord Edward, I am quite
well. Very glad indeed to have the honour and pleasure of
seeing you. I hope Lady Edward is well. Delighted, I am
sure.)' Pending the last parenthesis, he stopped to shake
hands with a dim old gentleman in a flaxen wig, whose eye
he had been exceedingly solicitous to catch, and, when we went
on again, seemed so refreshed and braced by the interview that
I believe him to have been for the time actually taller. This
in Hobbs, whom I knew to be miserably poor, whom I saw
with my eyes to be prematurely grey, the best part of whose
life had been changed into a wretched dream from which he
could never awake now, who was in mourning with out and in
mourning within, and all through causes that any half-dozen
shopkeepers taken at random from the London Directory
and shot into Downing Street out of sacks could have turned
aside — this, I say, in Hobbs, of all men, gave me so much to
think about, that I took little or no heed of his further con-
versation until I found we had come to Burlington House.
*A little sketch,' he was saying then, 'by a little child, and two
hundred and fifty pounds already bid for it ! Well, it 's very
gratifying, isn't it? Really, it's very gratifying! Won't
you come in? Do come in!' I excused myself, and Hobbs
went in without me : a drop in a swollen current of the general
public. I looked into the courtyard as I went by, and thought
I perceived a remarkably fine specimen of the Toady Tree in
full growth there.
There is my friend Nobbs. A man of sufficient merit, one
would suppose, to be calmly self-reliant, and to preserve that
manly equilibrium which as little needs to assert itself over-
much, as to derive a sickly reflected light from any one else.
I declare in the face of day, that I believe Nobbs to be mor-
ally and physically unable to sit at a table and hear a man
of title mentioned, whom he knows, without putting in his
claim to the acquaintance. I have observed Nobbs under
these circumstances, a thousand times, and have never found
him able to hold his peace. I have seen him fidget, and worry
himself, and try to get himself away from the Toady Tree,
and say to himself as plainly as he could have said aloud.
THE TOADY TREE 57
'Nobbs, Nobbs, is not this base in you, and what can it possi-
bly matter to these people present, whether you know this
man, or not?' Yet, there has been a compulsion upon him
to say, 'Lord Dash Blank?' 'Oh, yes! I know him very well;
very well, indeed. I have known Dash Blank — let me see —
really I am afraid to say how long I have known Dash Blank.
It must be a dozen years. A very good fellow, Dash
Blank!' And, like my friend Hobbs, he has been positively
taller for some moments afterwards. I assert of Nobbs, as
I have already in effect asserted of Dobbs, that if I could be
brought blindfold into a room full of company, of whom he
made one, I could tell in a moment, by his manner of speak-
ing, not to say by his mere breathing, whether there were
a title present. The ancient Egyptians in their palmiest
days, had not an enchanter among them who could have
wrought such a magical change in Nobbs, as the incarnation
of one line from the book of the Peerage can effect in one
minute.
Pobbs is as bad, though in a different way. Pobbs affects
to despise these distinctions. He speaks of his titled ac-
quaintances, in a light and easy vein, as 'the swells.' Ac-
cording as his humour varies, he will tell you that the swells
are, after all, the best people a man can have to do with, or
that he is weary of the swells and has had enough of them.
But, note, that to the best of my knowledge, information,
and belief, Pobbs would die of chagrin, if the swells left off
asking him to dinner. That he would rather exchange nods
in the Park with a semi-idiotic Dowager, than fraternise with
another Shakespeare. That he would rather have his sis-
ter, Miss Pobbs (he is greatly attached to her, and is a most
excellent brother), received on sufferance by the swells, than
hold her far happier place in the outer darkness of the un-
titled, and be loved and married by some good fellow, who
could daff the world of swells aside, and bid it pass. Yet,
O, Pobbs, Pobbs! if for once — only for once — you could
hear the magnificent patronage of some of those Duchesses
of yours, casually making mention of Miss Pobbs, as 'a
rather pretty person !'
I say nothing of Robbs, Sobbs, Tobbs, and so on to Zobbs,
58 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
whose servility has no thin coating of disguise or shame upon
it, who grovel on their waistcoats with a sacred joy, and who
turn and roll titles in their mouths as if they were exquisite
sweetmeats. I say nothing of Mayors and such like ; — to
lay on adulation with a whitewashing brush and have it laid
on in return, is the function of such people, and verily they
have their reward. I say nothing of County families, and
provincial neighbourhoods, and lists of Stewards and Lady
Patronesses, and electioneering, and racing, and flower-show-
ing, and demarcations and counter-demarcations in visiting,
and all the forms in which the Toady Tree is cultivated in
and about cathedral towns and rural districts. What I wish
to remark in conclusion is not that, but this :
If, at a momentous crisis in the history and progress of
the country we all love, we, the bulk of the people, fairly
embodying the general moderation and sense, are so mis-
taken by a class, undoubtedly of great intelligence and pub-
lic and private worth, as that, either they cannot by any
means comprehend our resolution to live henceforth under a
Government, instead of a Hustlement and Shufflement; or,
comprehending it, can think to put it away by cocking their
hats in our faces (which is the official exposition of policy
conceded to us on all occasions by our chief minister of
State ) ; the fault is our own. As the fault is our own, so is
the remedy. We do not present ourselves to these personages
as we really are, and we have no reason for surprise or com-
plaint, if they take us for what we are at so much pains to
appear. Let every man, therefore, apply his own axe to
his own branch of the Toady Tree. Let him begin the essen-
tial Reform with himself, and he need have no fear of its
ending there. We require no ghost to tell us that many in-
equalities of condition and distinction there must always be.
Every step at present to be counted in the great social stair-
case would be still there, though the shadow of the Toady
Tree were cleared away. More than this, the whole of the
steps would be safer and stronger; for, the Toady Tree is
a tree infected with rottenness, and its droppings wear away
what they fall upon.
CHEAP PATRIOTISM 59
CHEAP PATRIOTISM
[JUNE 9, 1855]
WHEN the writer of this paper states that he has retired
from the civil service on a superannuation fund to which he
contributed during forty years, he trusts that the prejudice
likely to be engendered by the admission that he has been a
Government-clerk, will not be violently strong against him.
In short, to express myself in the first person at once — for,
to that complexion I feel I must come, in consequence of the
great difficulty of sustaining the third — I beg to make it
known that I have no longer any connexion with Somerset
House. I am a witness without bias, and will relate my ex-
perience in an equitable manner.
Of my official career as an individual clerk, I may soon
dispose. I went into the office at eighteen (my father having
recently 'plumped for Grobus,' who, under the less familiar
designation of The Right Honourable Sir Gilpin Grobus
Grobus, Bart., one of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy
Council, retired into remote space and unapproachable grand-
eur immediately after his election), and began at ninety
pounds a-year. I did all the usual things. I wasted as much
writing-paper as I possibly could. I set up all my younger
brothers with public penknives. I took to modelling in seal-
ing-wax (being hopeless of getting through the quantity I
was expected to consume by any other means), and I copied a
large amount of flute music into a ponderous vellum-covered
book with an anchor outside (supposed to be devoted to the
service of the Royal Navy), on every page of which there was
a neat water-mark, representing Britannia with a sprig in her
hand, seated in an oval. I lunched at the office every day,
when I stayed till lunch time which was two o'clock, at an
average expense of about sixty pounds per annum. My dress
cost me (or cost somebody — I really at this distance of time
cannot say whom), about a hundred more; and I spent the
remainder of my salary in general amusements.
We had the usual kind of juniors in the office, when I was
60
a junior. We had young O'Killamollybore, nephew of the
Member, and son of the extensive Irish Proprietor who had
killed the other extensive Irish Proprietor in the famous
duel arising out of the famous quarrel at the famous assem-
bly about dancing with the famous Beauty — with the whole
particulars of which events, mankind was acquainted. O'Kil-
lamollybore represented himself to have been educated at
every seat of learning in the empire — and I dare say had
been; but, he had not come out of the ordeal, in an ortho-
graphical point of view, with the efficiency that might have
been expected. He also represented himself as a great artist,
and used to put such capital imitations of the marks they
make at the shops, on the backs of his pencil-drawings, that
they had all the appearance of having been purchased. We
had young Percival Fitz-Legionite, of the great Fitz-Le-
gionite family, who, 'took the quarterly pocket-money,' as
he told us, for the sake of having something to do (he never
did it), and who went to all the parties in the morning pa-
pers, and used to be always opening soda-water all over the
desks. We had Meltonbury, another nob and our great
light, who had been in a crack regiment, and had betted and
sold out, and had got his mother, old Lady Meltonbury, to
'stump up,' on condition of his coming into our office, and
playing at hockey with the coals. We had Scrivens (just
of age), who dressed at the Prince Regent; and we had
Baber, who represented the Turf in our department, and
made a book, and wore a speckled blue cravat and top-boots.
Finally, we had one extra clerk at five shillings a-day, who
had three children, and did all the work, and was much
looked down upon by the messengers.
As to our ways of getting through the time, we used to
stand before the fire, warming ourselves behind, until we
made ourselves faint ; and we used to read the papers ; and,
in hot weather, we used to make lemonade and drink it. We
used to yawn a good deal, and ring the bell a good deal, and
chat and lounge a good deal, and go out a good deal, and
come back a little. We used to compare notes as to the pre-
cious slavery it was, and as to the salary not being enough
CHEAP PATRIOTISM 61
for bread and cheese, and as to the manner in which we were
screwed by the public — and we used to take our revenge on
the public by keeping it waiting and giving it short answers,
whenever it came into our office. It has been matter of con-
tinuous astonishment to me, during many years, that the
public never took me, when I was a junior, by the nape of
my neck, and dropped me over the banisters down three
stories into the hall.
However, Time was good enough without any assistance
on my part, to remove me from the juniors and to hoist me
upward. I shed some of my impertinences as I grew older
(which is the custom of most men), and did what I had to do,
reasonably well. It did not require the head of a Chief Jus-
tice, or a Lord Chancellor, and I may even say that in gen-
eral I believe I did it very well. There is a considerable
flourish just now, about examining candidates for clerkships,
as if they wanted to take high degrees in learned professions.
I don't myself think that Chief Justices and Lord Chancel-
lors are to be got for twenty-two pound ten a quarter, with
a final prospect of some five or six hundred a year in the
ripe fulness of futurity — and even if they were, I doubt if
their abilities could come out very strongly in the usual work
of a government office.
This brings me to that part of my experience which I wish
to put forth. It is surprising what I have, in my time, seen
done in our Department in the reforming way — but always
beginning at the wrong end — always stopping at the small
men — always showing the public virtue of Two thousand a
year M.P. at the expense of that wicked little victim, Two
hundred a year. I will recall a few instances.
The head of our Department came in and went out with
the Ministry. The place was a favourite place, being uni-
versally known among place-people as a snug thing. Soon
after I became a Chief in the office, there was a change of
Ministry, and we got Lord Stumpington. Down came Lord
Stumpington on a certain day, and I had notice to be in
readiness to attend him. I found him a very free and pleas-
ant nobleman (he had lately had great losses on the turf, or
62 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
he wouldn't have accepted any public office), and he had his
nephew the Honourable Charles Random with him, whom
he had appointed as his official private secretary.
'Mr. Tapenham, I believe?' said His Lordship, with his
hands under his coat-tails before the fire. I bowed and re-
peated, 'Mr. Tapenham.' 'Well, Mr. Tapenham,' said His
Lordship, 'how are we getting on in this Department?' I
said that I hoped we were getting on pretty well. 'At what
time do your fellows come in the morning, now?' said His
Lordship. 'Half -past ten, my Lord.' 'The devil they do!'
said His Lordship. 'Do you come at half -past ten?' 'At
half -past ten, my Lord.' 'Can't imagine how you do it,' said
His Lordship. 'Surprising! Well, Mr. Tapenham, we must
do something here, or the opposition will be down upon us
and we shall get floored. What can we do? What do your
fellows work at? Do they do sums, or do they write, or
what are they usually up to?' I explained the general du-
ties of our Department, which seemed to stagger His Lord-
ship exceedingly. ' 'Pon my soul,' he said, turning to his
private secretary, 'I am afraid from Mr. Tapenharn's account
this is a horrible bore, Charley. However, we must do some-
thing, Mr. Tapenham, or we shall have those fellows down
upon us and get floored. Isn't there any Class (you spoke
of the various Classes in the Department just now), that we
could cut down a bit? Couldn't we clear off some salaries,
or superannuate a few fellows, or blend something with some-
thing else, and make a sort of an economical fusion some-
where?' I looked doubtful, and felt perplexed. 'I tell you
what we can do, Mr. Tapenham, at any rate,' said His Lord-
ship, brightening with a happy idea. 'We can make your
fellows come at ten — Charley, you must turn out in the mid-
dle of the night and come at ten. And let us have a Min-
ute that in future the fellows must know something — say
French, Charley; and be up in their arithmetic — Rule of
Three, Tare and Tret, Charley, Decimals, or something or
other. And Mr. Tapenham, if you will be so good as to put
yourself in communication with Mr. Random, perhaps you
will be able between you to knock out some idea in the eco-
nomical fusion way. Charley, I am sure you will find Mr.
CHEAP PATRIOTISM 63
Tapenham a most invaluable coadjutor, and I have no doubt
that with such assistance, and getting the fellows here at Ten,
we shall make quite a Model Department of it and do all sorts
of things to promote the efficiency of the public service.'
Here His Lordship, who had a very easy and captivating
manner, laughed, and shook hands with me, and said that he
needn't detain me any longer.
That Government lasted two or three years, and then we
got Sir Jasper Janus, who had acquired in the House the
reputation of being a remarkable man of business, through
the astonishing confidence with which he explained details of
which he was entirely ignorant, to an audience who knew
no more of them than he did. Sir Jasper had been in office
very often, and was known to be a Dragon in the recklessness
of his determination to make out a case for himself. It was
our Department's first experience of him, and I attended him
with fear and trembling. 'Mr. Tapenham,' said Sir Jasper,
'if your memoranda are prepared, I wish to go through the
whole business and system of this Department with you. I
must first master it completely, and then take measures for
consolidating it.' He said this with severe official gravity,
and I entered on my statement ; he leaning back in his chair
with his feet on the fender, outwardly looking at me, and
inwardly (as it appeared to me), paying no attention what-
ever to anything I said. 'Very good, Mr. Tapenham,' he
observed, when I had done. 'Now, I gather from your ex-
position'— whereas I know he had got it out of the Court
Calendar before he came — 'that there are forty-seven clerks
in this Department, distributed through four classes, A, B,
C, and D. This Department must be consolidated, by the
reduction of those forty-seven clerks to thirty-four — in other
words, by the abolition of thirteen juniors — the substitution
of two classes and a Remove for four — and the construction
of an entirely new system of check, by double entry and
countersign, on the issue at the outports of fore-top-gallant-
yards and snatch-blocks to the Royal Navy. You will be so
good, Mr. Tapenham, as to furnish me with the project you
would recommend for carrying this consolidation into ef-
fect, the day after to-morrow, as I desire to be in a condition
64
to explain the consolidation I propose, when the House is in
committee on the Miscellaneous Estimates.' I had nothing
for it but to flounder through an impracticable plan that
would barely last Sir Jasper Janus's time (which I knew per-
fectly well, was all he cared for), and he made a speech upon
it that would have set up the Ministry, if any effort could
have made such a lame thing walk. I do in my conscience
believe that in every single point he touched arising out of
our Department, he was as far from accuracy as mortal man
could possibly be; yet he was inaccurate with such an air,
that I almost doubted my own knowledge of the facts as I sat
below the bar and heard him. I myself observed three ad-
mirals cheering vigorously when the fore-top-gallant-yards
and snatch-blocks came into play ; and though the effect of
that part of the consolidation was, that no ship in the Navy
could under any conceivable circumstances of emergency
have got rigged while it lasted, it became so strong a card in
Sir Jasper's favour that within a fortnight after the com-
ing-in of the opposition, he gave notice of his intention to
ask his successor 'Whether Her Majesty's Government had
abandoned the system of check by double-entry and counter-
sign, on the issue at the outports of fore-top-gallant-yards
and snatch-blocks,' amidst vehement cheering.
The next man of mark we got, was the Right Honourable
Mr. Gritts, the member for Sordust. Mr. Gritts came to our
Department with a Principle ; and the principle was, that no
man in a clerkship ought to have more than a hundred a-year.
Mr. Gritts held that more did such a man no good; that he
didn't want it ; that he was not a producer — for he grew
nothing; or a manufacturer — for he changed the form of
nothing; and that there was some first principle in figures
which limited the income of a man who grew nothing and
changed the form of nothing, to a maximum of exactly one
hundred pounds a-year. Mr. Gritts had acquired a reputa-
tion for unspeakable practical sagacity, entirely on the
strength of this discovery. I believe it is not too much to
say, that he had destroyed two Chancellors of the Exchequer
by hammering them on the head with it, night and day.
Now, I have seen a little jobbery in forty years; but, such
SMUGGLED RELATIONS 65
a jobber as Mr. Gritts of Sordust never entered our Depart-
ment. He brought a former book-keeper of his with him as
his private secretary, and I am absolutely certain, to begin
with, that he pocketed one-half of that unfortunate man's
public salary, and made it an exalted piece of patronage to
let him have the other. Of all the many underfed, melan-
choly men whom Mr. Gritts appointed, I doubt if there were
one who was not appointed corruptly. We had consolida-
tions of clerkships to provide for his brother-in-law, we had
consolidations of clerkships to provide for his cousin, we had
amalgamations to increase his own salary, we had immola-
tions of juniors on the altar of the country every day — but
I never knew the country to require the immolation of a
Gritts. Add to this, that it became the pervading character-
istic of our Department to do everything with intense mean-
ness ; to alienate everybody with whom he had to deal ; to
shuffle, and chaffer, and equivocate; and be shabby, sus-
picious, and huckstering; and the Gritts administration is
faithfully described. Naturally enough, we soon got round
to Lord Stumpington again, and then we came to Sir Jasper
Janus again ; and so we have been ringing the changes on
the Stumpingtons and Januses, and each of them has been
undoing the doings of the other, ever since.
I am in a disinterested position, and wish to give the pub-
lic a caution. They will never get any good out of those
virtuous changes that are severely virtuous upon the juniors.
Such changes originate in the cheapest patriotism in the
world, and the commonest. The official system is upside
down, and the roots are at the top. Begin there, and the
little branches will soon come right.
SMUGGLED RELATIONS
[JUNE 23, 1855]
WHEN I was a child, I remember to have had my ears boxed
for informing a lady-visitor who made a morning call at our
house, that a certain ornamental object on the table, which
66 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
was covered with marbled-paper, 'wasn't marble.' Years of
reflection upon this injury have fully satisfied me that the
honest object in question never imposed upon anybody ; fur-
ther, that my honoured parents, though both of a sanguine
temperament, never can have conceived it possible that it
might, could, should, would, or did, impose upon anybody.
Yet, I have no doubt that I had my ears boxed for violating
a tacit compact in the family and among the family visitors,
to blink the stubborn fact of the marbled paper, and agree
upon a fiction of real marble.
Long after this, when my ears had been past boxing for a
quarter of a century, I knew a man with a cork leg. That
he had a cork leg — or, at all events, that he was at immense
pains to take about with him a leg which was not his own
leg, or a real leg — was so plain and obvious a circumstance,
that the whole universe might have made affidavit of it.
Still, it was always understood that this cork leg was to be
regarded as a leg of flesh and blood, and even that the very
subject of cork in the abstract was to be avoided in the
wearer's society.
I have had my share of going about the world; wherever
I have been, I have found the marbled paper and the cork
leg. I have found them in many forms; but, of all their
Protean shapes, at once the commonest and strangest has
been — Smuggled Relations.
I was on intimate terms for many, many years, with my
late lamented friend, Cogsford, of the great Greek house of
Cogsford Brothers and Cogsford. I was his executor. I
believe he had no secrets from me but one — his mother.
That the agreeable old lady who kept his house for him was
his mother, must be his mother, couldn't possibly be anybody
but his mother, was evident: not to me alone, but to every-
body who knew him. She was not a refugee, she was not pro-
scribed, she was not in hiding, there was no price put upon
her venerable head ; she was invariably liked and respected as
a good-humoured, sensible, cheerful old soul. Then why did
Cogsford smuggle his mother all the days of his life? I
have not the slightest idea why. I cannot so much as say
whether she had ever contracted a second marriage, and her
SMUGGLED RELATIONS 67
name was really Mrs. Bean: or whether that name was be-
stowed upon her as a part of the smuggling transaction.
I only know that there she used to sit at one end of the hos-
pitable table, the living image in a cap of Cogsford at the
other end, and that Cogsford knew that I knew who she was.
Yet, if I had been a Custom-house officer at Folkestone, and
Mrs. Bean a French clock that Cogsford was furtively bring-
ing from Paris in a hat-box, he could not have made her the
subject of a more determined and deliberate pretence. It
was prolonged for years upon years. It survived the good
old lady herself. One day, I received an agitated note from
Cogsford, entreating me to go to him immediately; I went,
and found him weeping, and in the greatest affliction, 'My
dear friend,' said he, pressing my hand, 'I have lost Mrs.
Bean. She is no more.' I went to the funeral with him.
He was in the deepest grief. He spoke of Mrs. Bean on the
way back, as the best of women. But, even then he never
hinted that Mrs. Bean was his mother; and the first and last
acknowledgment of the fact that I ever had from him was
in his last will, wherein he entreated 'his said dear friend and
executor' to observe that he requested to be buried beside his
mother — whom he didn't even name, he was so perfectly con-
fident that I had detected Mrs. Bean.
I was once acquainted with another man who smuggled a
brother. This contraband relative made mysterious appear-
ances and disappearances, and knew strange things. He was
called John — simply John. I have got into a habit of be-
lieving that he must have been under a penalty to forfeit some
weekly allowance if he ever claimed a surname. He came
to light in this way ; — I wanted some information respecting
the remotest of the Himalaya range of mountains, and I ap-
plied to my friend Benting (a member of the Geographical
Society, and learned on such points), to advise me. After
some consideration, Benting said, in a half reluctant and con-
strained way, very unlike his usual frank manner, that he
'thought he knew a man' who could tell me, of his own ex-
perience, what I wanted to learn. An appointment was made
for a certain evening at Benting's house. I arrived first, and
had not observed for more than five minutes that Benting
68 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
was under a curious cloud, when his servant announced —
in a hushed, and I may say unearthly manner — 'Mr. John.'
A rather stiff and shabby person appeared, who called Bent-
ing by no name whatever (a singularity that I always ob-
served whenever I saw them together afterwards), and whose
manner was curiously divided between familiarity and dis-
tance. I found this man to have been all over the Indies, and
to possess an extraordinary fund of traveller's experience.
It came from him drily at first ; but he warmed, and it flowed
freely until he happened to meet Benting's eye. Then, he
subsided again, and (it appeared to me), felt himself, for
some unknown reason, in danger of losing that weekly allow-
ance. This happened a dozen times in a couple of hours,
and not the least curious part of the matter was, that Bent-
ing himself was always as much disconcerted as the other
man. It did not occur to me that night, that this was Bent-
ing's brother, for I had known him very well indeed for
years, and had always understood him to have none. Neither
can I now recall, nor, if I could, would it matter, by what de-
grees and stages I arrived at the knowledge. However this
may be, I knew it, and Benting knew that I knew it. But,
we always preserved the fiction that I could have no sus-
picion that there was any sort of kindred or affinity between
them. He went to Mexico, this John — and he went to Aus-
tralia— and he went to China — and he died somewhere in
Persia — and one day, when we went down to dinner at Bent-
ing's I would find him in the dining-room, already seated
(as if he had just been counting the allowance on the table-
cloth), and another day I would hear of him as being among
scarlot parrots in the tropics; but, I never knew whether he
had ever done anything wrong, or whether he had ever done
anything right, or why he went about the world, or how. As
I have already signified, I get into habits of believing; and
I have got into a habit of believing that Mr. John had
something to do with the dip of the magnetic needle — he is
all vague and shadowy to me, however, and I only know him
for certain to have been a smuggled relation.
Other people, again, put these contraband commodities en-
tirely away from the light, as smugglers of wine and brandy
SMUGGLED RELATIONS 69
bury tubs. I have heard of a man who never imparted, to
his most intimate friend, the terrific secret that he had a re-
lation in the world, except when he lost one by death; and
then he would be weighed down by the greatness of the
calamity, and would refer to his bereavement as if he had
lost the very shadow of himself, from whom he had never
been separated since the days of infancy. Within my own
experience, I have observed smuggled relations to possess
a wonderful quality of coming out when they die. My own
dear Tom, who married my fourth sister, and who is a great
Smuggler, never fails to speak to me of one of his relations
newly deceased, as though, instead of never having in the
remotest way alluded to that relative's existence before, he
had been perpetually discoursing of it. 'My poor, dear,
darling Emmy,' he said to me, within these six months, 'she is
gone — I have lost her.' Never until that moment had Tom
breathed one syllable to me of the existence of any Emmy
whomsoever on the face of this earth, in whom he had the
smallest interest. He had scarcely allowed me to under-
stand, very distantly and generally, that he had some rela-
tions— 'my people,' he called them — down in Yorkshire.
'My own dear, darling Emmy,' says Tom notwithstanding,
'she has left me for a better world.' (Tom must have left
her for his own world, at least fifteen years). I repeated,
feeling my way, 'Emmy, Tom?' 'My favourite niece,' said
Tom, in a reproachful tone, 'Emmy, you know. I was her
godfather, you remember. Darling, fair-haired Emmy!
Precious, blue-eyed child!' Tom burst into tears, and we
both understood that henceforth the fiction was established
between us that I had been quite familiar with Emmy by
reputation, through a series of years.
Occasionally, smuggled relations are discovered by acci-
dent: just as those tubs may be, to which I have referred.
My other half — I mean, of course, my wife — once discovered
a large cargo in this way, which had been long concealed.
In the next street to us, lived an acquaintance of ours, who
was a Commissioner of something or other, and kept a hand-
some establishment. We used to exchange dinners, and I
have frequently heard him at his own table mention his
70 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
father as a 'poor dear good old boy,' who had been dead for
any indefinite period. He was rather fond of telling anec-
dotes of his very early days, and from them it appeared that
he had been an only child. One summer afternoon, my
other half, walking in our immediate neighbourhood, hap-
pened to perceive Mrs. Commissioner's last year's bonnet
(to every inch of which, it is unnecessary to add, she could
have sworn), going along before her on somebody else's
head. Having heard generally of the swell mob, my good
lady's first impression was, that the wearer of this bonnet
belonged to that fraternity, had just abstracted the bonnet
from its place of repose, was in every sense of the term walk-
ing off with it, and ought to be given into the custody of
the nearest policeman. Fortunately, however, my Susannah,
who is not distinguished by closeness of reasoning or pres-
ence of mind, reflected, as it were by a flash of inspiration,
that the bonnet might have been given away. Curious to
see to whom, she quickened her steps, and descried beneath it,
an ancient lady of an iron-bound presence, in whom (for my
Susannah has an eye), she instantly recognised the lineaments
of the Commissioner! Eagerly pursuing this discovery, she,
that very afternoon, tracked down an ancient gentleman in
one of the Commissioner's hats. Next day she came upon
the trail of four stony maidens, decorated with artificial flow-
ers out of the Commissioner's epergne ; and thus we dug up
the Commissioner's father and mother and four sisters, who
had been for some years secreted in lodgings round the cor-
ner and never entered the Commissioner's house save in the
dawn of morning and the shades of evening. From that
time forth, whenever my Susannah made a call at the Com-
missioner's, she always listened on the doorstep for any slight
preliminary scuffling in the hall, and, hearing it, was de-
lighted to remark, 'The family are here, and they are hiding
them !'
I have never been personally acquainted with any gentle-
man who kept "his mother-in-law in the kitchen, in the useful
capacity of Cook ; but I have heard of such a case on good
authority. I once lodged in the house of a genteel lady
claiming to be a widow, who had four pretty children, and
SMUGGLED RELATIONS 71
might be occasionally overheard coercing an obscure man in
a sleeved waistcoat, who appeared to be confined in some Pit
below the foundations of the house, where he was condemned
to be always cleaning knives. One day, the smallest of the
children crept into my room, and said, pointing downward
with a little chubby finger, 'Don't tell ! It 's Pa 1' and van-
ished on tiptoe.
One other branch of the smuggling trade demands a word
of mention before I conclude. My friend of friends in my
bachelor days, became the friend of the house when I got
married. He is our Amelia's godfather; Amelia being the
eldest of our cherubs. Through upwards of ten years he
was backwards and forwards at our house three or four times
a week, and always found his knife and fork ready for him.
What was my astonishment on coming home one day to find
Susannah sunk upon the oil-cloth in the hall, holding her
brow with both hands, and meeting my gaze, when I admit-
ted myself with my latch-key, in a distracted manner! 'Su-
sannah,' I exclaimed, 'what has happened?' She merely
ejaculated, 'Larver' — that being the name of the friend in
question. 'Susannah!' said I, 'what of Larver? Speak!
Has he met with any accident? Is he ill?' Susannah replied
faintly, 'Married — married before we were !' and would have
gone into hysterics but that I made a rule of never permitting
that disorder under my roof.
For upwards of ten years, my bosom friend Larver, in
close communication with me every day, had smuggled a
wife! He had at last confided the truth to Susannah, and
had presented Mrs. Larver. There was no kind of reason
for this, that we could ever find out. Even Susannah had
not a doubt of things being all correct. He had 'run' Mrs.
Larver into a little cottage in Hertfordshire, and nobody
ever knew why, or ever will know. In fact, I believe there
was no why in it.
The most astonishing part of the matter is, that I have
known other men do exactly the same thing. I could give
the names of a dozen in a footnote, if I thought it right.
72 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
THE GREAT BABY
[AUGUST 4, 1855]
HAS it occurred to any of our readers that that is surely an
unsatisfactory state of society which presents, in the year
eighteen hundred and fifty-five, the spectacle of a commit-
tee of the People's representatives, pompously and publicly
inquiring how the People shall be trusted with the liberty of
refreshing themselves in humble taverns and tea-gardens on
their day of rest? Does it appear to any one whom we now
address, and who will pause here to reflect for a moment on
the question we put, that there is anything at all humiliating
and incongruous in the existence of such a body, and pursuit
of such an enquiry, in this country, at this time of day?
For ourselves, we will answer the question without hesita-
tion. We feel indignantly ashamed of the thing as a na-
tional scandal. It would be merely contemptible, if it were
not raised into importance by its slanderous aspersions of a
hard-worked, heavily-taxed, but good-humoured and most pa-
tient people, who have long deserved far better treatment.
In this green midsummer, here is a committee virtually en-
quiring whether the English can be regarded in any other
light, and domestically ruled in any other manner, than as
a gang of drunkards and disorderlies on a Police charge-
sheet! O my Lords and Gentlemen, my Lords and Gentle-
men, have we got so very near Utopia after our long travel-
ling together over the dark and murderous road of English
history, that we have nothing else left to say and do to the
people but this? Is there nothing abroad, nothing at home,
nothing seen by us, nothing hidden from us, which points to
higher and more generous things?
There are two public bodies remarkable for knowing noth-
ing of the people, and for perpetually interfering to put
them right. The one is the House of Commons; the other
the Monomaniacs. Between the Members and the Mono-
maniacs, the devoted People, quite unheard, get harried and
worried to the last extremity. Everybody of ordinary
THE GREAT BABY 73
sense, possessing common sympathies with necessities not their
own, and common means of observation — Members and Mon-
omaniacs are of course excepted — has perceived for months
past, that it was manifestly impossible that the People could
or would endure the inconveniences and deprivations, sought
to be imposed upon them by the latest Sunday restrictions.
We who write this, have again and again by word of mouth
forewarned many scores both of Members and Monomaniacs,
as we have heard others forewarn them, that what they were
in the densest ignorance allowing to be done, could not be
borne. Members and Monomaniacs knew better, or cared
nothing about it ; and we all know the rest — to this time.
Now, the Monomaniacs, being by their disease impelled to
clamber upon platforms, and there squint horribly under the
strong possession of an unbalanced idea, will of course be
out of reason and go wrong. But, why the Members should
yield to the Monomaniacs is another question. And why do
they? It is because the People is altogether an abstraction
to them ; a Great Baby, to be coaxed and chucked under the
chin at elections, and frowned upon at quarter sessions, and
stood in the corner on Sundays, and taken out to stare at
the Queen's coach on holidays, and kept in school under the
rod, generally speaking, from Monday morning to Saturday
night ? Is it because they have no other idea of the People than
a big-headed Baby, now to be flattered and now to be scolded,
now to be sung to and now to be denounced to old Boguey,
now to be kissed and now to be whipped, but always to be kept
in long clothes, and never under any circumstances to feel
its legs and go about of itself? We take the liberty of reply-
ing, Yes.
And do the Members and Monomaniacs suppose that this is
our discovery? Do they live in the shady belief that the ob-
ject of their capricious dandling and punishing does not re-
sentfully perceive that it is made a Great Baby of, and may
not begin to kick thereat with legs that may do mischief?
In the first month of the existence of this Journal, we called
attention to a detachment of the Monomaniacs, who, under the
name of jail-chaplains, had taken possession of the prisons,
and were clearly offering premiums to vice, promoting hypoc-
74 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
risy, and making models of dangerous scoundrels.1 They
had their way, and the Members backed them ; and now their
Pets recruit the very worst class of criminals known. The
Great Baby, to whom this copy was set as a moral lesson, is
supposed to be perfectly unimpressed by the real facts, and
to be entirely ignorant of them. So, down at Westminster,
night after night, the Right Honourable Gentleman the Mem-
ber for Somewhere, and the Honourable Gentleman the Mem-
ber for Somewherelse, badger one another, to the infinite de-
light of their adherents in the cockpit; and when the Prime
Minister has released his noble bosom of its personal injuries,
and has made his jokes and retorts for the evening, and has
said little and done less, he winds up with a standard form of
words respecting the vigorous prosecution of the war, and a
just and honourable peace, which are especially let off upon
the Great Baby ; which Baby is always supposed never to have
heard before ; and which it is understood to be a part of
Baby's catechism to be powerfully affected by. And the
Member for Somewhere, and the Member for Somewherelse,
and the Noble Lord, and all the rest of that Honourable
House, go home to bed, really persuaded that the Great Baby
has been talked to sleep !
Let us see how the unfortunate Baby is addressed and
dealt with, in the inquiry concerning his Sunday eatings and
drinkings — as wild as a nursery rhyme, and as inconclusive as
Bedlam.
The Great Baby is put upon his trial. A mighty noise of
creaking boots is heard in an outer passage. O good gra-
cious, here 's an official personage ! Here 's a solemn wit-
ness ! Mr. Gamp, we believe you have been a dry-nurse to the
Great Baby for some years? Yes, I have. — Intimately ac-
quainted with his character? Intimately acquainted — As a
police magistrate, Mr. Gamp? As a police magistrate. (Sen-
sation.)— Pray, Mr. Gamp, would you allow a working man,
a small tradesman, clerk, or the like, to go to Hampstead or to
Hampton Court at his own convenience on a Sunday, with his
family, and there to be at liberty to regale himself and them,
i See previous article entitled Pet Prisoners.
THE GREAT BABY 75
in a tavern where he could buy a pot of beer and a glass of
gin-and-water? I would on no account concede that permis-
sion to any person. — Will you be so kind as to state why, Mr.
Gamp? Willingly. Because I have presided for many years
at the Bo-Peep police office, and have seen a great deal of
drunkenness there. A large ma j ority of the Bo-Peep charges
*re charges against persons of the lowest class, of having been
found drunk and incapable of taking care of themselves. — Will
you instance a case, Mr. Gamp? I will instance the case of
Sloggins.1 — Was that a man with a broken nose, a black eye,
and a bull-dog? Precisely so. — Was Sloggins frequently the
sub j ect of such a charge ? Continually. I may say, constantly.
— Especially on Monday? Just so. Especially on Monday.
— And therefore you would shut the public-houses, and par-
ticularly the suburban public-houses, against the free access
of working-people on Sunday? Most decidedly so. (Mr.
Gamp retires, much complimented. )
Naughty Baby, attend to the Reverend Single Swallow !
Mr. Swallow, you have been much in the confidence of thieves
and miscellaneous miscreants? I have the happiness to believe
that they have made me the unworthy depository of their un-
bounded confidence. — Have they usually confessed to you that
they have been in the habit of getting drunk? Not drunk;
upon that point I wish to explain. Their ingenuous expres-
sion has generally been, 'lushy.' — But those are convertible
terms? I apprehend they are; still, as gushing freely from
a penitent breast, I am weak enough to wish to stipulate for
lushy ; I pray you bear with me. — Have you reason, Mr. Swal-
low, to believe that excessive indulgence in 'lush' has been the
cause of these men's crimes? O yes indeed. O yes ! — Do you
trace their offences to nothing else? They have always told
me, that they themselves traced them to nothing else worth
mentioning. — Are you acquainted with a man named Slog-
gins? O yes! I have the truest affection for Sloggins.—
Has he made any confidence to you that you feel justified in
disclosing, bearing on this subject of becoming lushy? Slog-
gins, when in solitary confinement, informed me, every morn-
iSee previous article entitled It is not Generally Known.
76
ing for eight months, always with tears in his eyes, and un,
formly at five minutes past eleven o'clock, that he attributed
his imprisonment to his having partaken of rum-and-water at
a licensed house of entertainment, called (I use his own
words) The Wiry Tarrier. He never ceased to recommend
that the landlord, landlady, young family, potboy, and the
whole of the frequenters of that establishment, should be
taken up. — Did you recommend Sloggins for a commutation
of his term, on a ticket of leave? I did. — Where is he now?
I believe he is in Newgate now. — Do you know what for?
Not of my own knowledge, but I have heard that he got into
trouble through having been weakly tempted into the folly of
garotting a market gardener. — Where was he taken for this
last offence? At The Wiry Tarrier, on a Sunday. — It is un-
necessary to ask you, Mr. Single Swallow, whether you there-
fore recommend the closing of all public-houses on a Sunday?
Quite unnecessary.
Bad Baby, fold your hands and listen to the Reverend Tem-
ple Pharisee, who will step out of his carriage at the Commit-
tee Door, to give you a character that will rather astonish you.
Mr. Temple Pharisee, you are the incumbent of the extensive
rectory of Camel-cum-Needle's-eye ? I am. — Will you be so
good as to state your experience of that district on a Sunday ?
Nothing can be worse. That part of the Rectory of Camel-
cum-Needle's-eye in which my principal church is situated,
abuts upon the fields. As I stand in the pulpit, I can actu-
ally see the people, through the side windows of the building
(when the heat of the weather renders it necessary to have
them open), walking. I have, on some occasions, heard them
laughing. Whistling has reached my curate's ears (he is an
industrious and well-meaning young man ) ; but I cannot say
I have heard it myself. — Is your church well frequented?
No. I have no reason to complain of the Pew-portion of my
flock, who are eminently respectable; but, the Free Seats are
comparatively deserted: which is the more emphatically de-
plorable, as there are not many of them. — Is there a Railway
near the church? I regret to state that there is, and that I
hear the rush of the trains, even while I am preaching. — Do
you mean to say that they do not slacken speed for vour
THE GREAT BABY 77
preaching? Not in the least. — Is there anything else near
the church, to which you would call the Committee's attention?
At the distance of a mile and a half and three rods (for my
clerk has measured it by my direction), there is a common
public-house with tea-gardens, called The Glimpse of Green.
In fine weather these gardens are filled with people on a Sun-
day evening. Frightful scenes take place there. Pipes are
smoked ; liquors mixed with hot water are drunk ; shrimps are
eaten ; cockles are consumed ; tea is swilled ; ginger-beer is
loudly exploded. Young women with their young men;
young men with their young women ; married people with
their children; baskets, bundles, little chaises, wicker-work
perambulators, every species of low abomination, is to be ob-
served there. As the evening closes in, they all come strag-
gling home together through the fields ; and the vague sounds
of merry conversation which then strike upon the ear, even at
the further end of my dining-room (eight-and-thirty feet by
twenty -seven), are most distressing. I consider The Glimpse
of Green irreconcileable with public morality. — Have you
heard of pickpockets resorting to this place? I have. My
clerk informed me that his uncle's brother-in-law, a marine
store-dealer who went there to observe the depravity of the
people, missed his pocket-handkerchief when he reached home.
Local ribaldry has represented him to be one of the persons
who had their pockets picked at St. Paul's Cathedral on the
last occasion when the Bishop of London preached there. I
beg to deny this ; I know those individuals very well, and they
were people of condition. — Do the mass of the inhabitants of
your district work hard all the week? I believe they do. —
Early and late? My curate reports so. — Are their houses
close and crowded? I believe they are. — Abolishing The
Glimpse of Green, where would you recommend them to go
on a Sunday? I should say to church. — Where after church?
Really, that is their affair; not mine.
Adamantine-hearted Baby, dissolve into scalding tears at
sight of the next witness, hanging his head and beating his
breast. He was one of the greatest drunkards in the world,
he tells you. When he was drunk, he was a very demon —
and he never was sober. He never takes any strong drink
78 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
now, and is as an angel of light. And because this man
never could use without abuse; and because he imitated the
Hyaena or other obscene animal, in not knowing, in the ferocity
of his appetites, what Moderation was ; therefore, O Big-
headed Baby, you perceive that he must become as a standard
for you ; and for his backslidings you shall be put in the cor-
ner evermore.
Ghost of John Bunyan, it is surely thou who usherest into
the Committee Room, the volunteer testifier, Mr. Monomania-
cal Patriarch ! Baby, 'a finger in each eye, and ashes from
the nearest dustbin on your wretched head, for it is all over
with you now. Mr. Monomaniacal Patriarch, have you paid
great attention to drunkenness? Immense attention, unspeak-
able attention. — For how many years? Seventy years. — Mr.
Monomaniacal Patriarch, have you ever been in Whitechapel?
Millions of times. — Did you ever shed tears over the scenes
you have witnessed there? Oceans of tears. — Mr. Mono-
maniacal Patriarch, will you proceed with your testimony?
Yes; I am the only man to be heard on the subject ; I am the
only man who knows anything about it. No connexion with
any other establishment ; all others are impostors ; I am the
real original. Other men are said to have looked into these
places, and to have worked to raise them out of the Slough
of Despond. Don't believe it. Nothing is genuine unless
signed by me. I am the original fly with the little eye. No-
body ever mourned over the miseries and vices of the lowest of
the low, but I. Nobody has ever been haunted by them,
waking and sleeping, but I. Nobody would raise up the
sunken wretches, but I. Nobody understands how to do it,
but I. — Do you think the People ever really want any beer
or liquor to drink ? Certainly not. I know all about it, and
I know they don't. — Do you think they ever ought to have
any beer or liquor to drink? Certainly not. I know all
about it, and I know they oughtn't. — Do you think they could
suffer any inconvenience from having their beer and liquor
entirely denied them? Certainly not. I know all about it,
and I know they couldn't.
Thus, the Great Baby is dealt with from the beginning to
the end of the chapter. It is supposed equally by the Mem-
T9
bers and by the Monomaniacs to be incapable of putting This
and That together, and of detecting the arbitrary nonsense of
these monstrous deductions. That a whole people, — a domes-
tic, reasonable, considerate people, whose good-nature and
good sense are the admiration of intelligent foreigners, and
who are no less certain to secure the affectionate esteem of
such of their own countrymen as will have the manhood to
be open with them, and to trust them, — that a whole people
should be judged by, and made to answer and suffer for, the
most degraded and most miserable among them, is a principle
so shocking in its injustice, and so lunatic in its absurdity,
that to entertain it for a moment is to exhibit profound ig-
norance of the English mind and character. In Mono-
maniacs this may be of no great significance, but in Mem-
bers it is alarming ; for, if they cannot be brought to under-
stand the People for whom they make laws, and if they so
grievously under-rate them, how is it to be hoped that they,
and the laws, and the People, being such a bundle of anomah'es,
can possibly thrive together?
It is not necessary for us, or for any decent person, to go
to Westminster, or anywhere else, to make a flourish against
intemperance. We abhor it; would have no drunkard about
us, on any consideration; woulJ thankfully see the child of
our heart, dead in his baby beauty, rather than he should live
and grow with the shadow of such a horror upon him. In
the name of Heaven, let drunkards and ruffians restrain them-
selves and be restrained by all conceivable means — but, not
govern, bind, and defame, the temperance, the industry, the
rational wants and decent enjoyments of a whole toiling na-
tion ! We oppose those virtuous Malays who run amuck out
of the House of Peers or Exeter Hall, as much as those
vicious Malays who run amuck out of Sailors' lodging-houses
in Rotherhithe. We have a constitutional objection in both
cases to being stabbed in the back, and we claim that the one
kind of Monomaniac has no more right than the other to
gash and disfigure honest people going their peaceable way.
Lastly, we humbly beg to assert and protest with all the
vigour that is in us, that the People is, in sober truth and
reality, something very considerably more than a Great Baby ;
80 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
that it has come to an age when it can distinguish sound from
sense; that mere jingle, will not do for it; in a word, that the
Great Baby is growing up, and had best be measured ac-
cordingly.
THE WORTHY MAGISTRATE
[AUGUST 25, 1855]
UNDER this stereotyped title expressive of deference to the
police-bench, we take the earliest opportunity afforded us by
our manner of preparing this publication, of calling upon
every Englishman who reads these pages to take notice what
he is. The circulation of this journal comprising a wide
diversity of classes, we use it to disseminate the information
that every Englishman is a drunkard. Drunkenness is the
national characteristic. Whereas the German people (when
uncontaminated by the English), are always sober, the Eng-
lish, setting at nought the bright example of the pure Ger-
mans domiciled among them, are always drunk. The author-
ity for this polite and faithful exposition of the English
character, is a modern Solomon, whose temple rears its head
near Drury Lane; the wise Mr. Hall, Chief Police Magis-
trate, sitting at Bow Street, Covent Garden, in the County of
Middlesex, Barrister-at-Law.
As we hope to keep this household word of Drunkard, af-
fixed to the Englishman by the awful Mr. Hall from whom
there is no appeal, pretty steadily before our readers, we
present the very pearl discovered in that magisterial oyster.
On Thursday, the ninth of this present month of August,
the following sublime passage evoked the virtuous laughter of
the thief-takers of Bow Street :
Mr. HALL. — Were you sober, Sir?
Prosecutor. — Yes, certainly.
Mr. HALL. — You must be a foreigner, then?
Prosecutor. — I am a German.
Mr. HALL. — Ah, that accounts for it. If you had been
»n Englishman, you would have been drunk, for a certainty.
THE WORTHY MAGISTRATE 81
Prosecutor (smiling). — The Germans get drunk sometimes,
I fear.
Mr. HAI>I>. — Yes, after they have resided any time in this
country. They acquire our English habits.
In reproducing these jioble expressions, equally honourable
to the Sage who uttered them, and to the Country that en-
dures them, we will correct half a dozen vulgar errors which,
within our observation, have been rather prevalent since the
great occasion on which the Oracle at Bow Street spake.
1. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that if a magis-
trate wilfully deliver himself of a slanderous aspersion, know-
ing it to be unjust, he is unfit for his post.
2. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that if a magis-
trate, in a fit of bile brought on by recent disregard of some
very absurd evidence of his, so yield to his ill-temper as to
deliver himself, in a sort of mad exasperation, of such slan-
derous aspersion as aforesaid, he is unfit for his post.
3. It is altogether a mistake to suppose it to be very ques-
tionable whether, even in degraded Naples at this time, a mag-
istrate could from the official bench insult and traduce the
whole people, without being made to suffer for it.
4. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that it would be
becoming in some one individual out of between six and
seven hundred national representatives, to be so far jealous of
the honour of his country, as indignantly to protest against
its being thus grossly stigmatised.
5. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that the Homa
Office has any association whatever with the general credit,
the general self-respect, the general feeling in behalf of de-
cent utterance, or the general resentment when the same is
most discreditably violated. The Home Office is merely an
ornamental institution supported out of the general pocket.
6. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that Mr. Hall is
anybody's business, or that we, the mere bone and sinew, tag
rag and bobtail of England, have anything to do with him,
but to pay him his salary, accept his Justice, and meekly bow
our heads to his high and mighty reproof.
82 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
A SLIGHT DEPRECIATION OF THE
CURRENCY
[NOVEMBER 3, 1855]
H
IT was said by the wise and witty Sydney Smith, that many
Englishmen appear to have a remarkable satisfaction in even
speaking of large sums of money ; and that when men of this
stamp say of Mr. So-and-So, 'I am told he is worth Two
HuN-dred Tnou-sand POUNDS,' there is a relish in their em-
phasis, an unctuous appetite and zest in their open-mouthed
enunciation, which nothing but the one inspiring theme,
Money, develops in them.
That this is an accurate piece of observation, few who ob
serve at all will dispute. Its application is limited to no class
of society, and it is even more generally true of the genteel
than of the vulgar. The last famous golden calf that dis-
figured this country, was set up for worship in the highest
places, and was pampered to its face and made a standing-
jest of behind its back throughout Belgravia, with an in-
tensity of meanness never surpassed in Seven Dials.
But I am not going to write a homily upon that ancient
text, the general deification of Money. The few words that
I wish to note down here, bear reference to one particular
misuse of Money, and exaggeration of its power, which pre-
sents itself to my mind as a curious rottenness appertaining to
this age.
Let us suppose, to begin with, that there was once upon a
time a Baron, who governed his estate not wisely nor too well,
and whose dependants sustained in consequence many pre-
ventible hardships. Let us suppose that the Baron was of
a highly generous disposition, and that when he found a vassal
to have been oppressed or maltreated by a hard or foolish
steward, who had strained against him some preposterous
point of the discordant system on which the estate was ad-
ministered, he immediately gave that vassal Money. Let us
suppose that such munificent action set the noble Baron's
mind completely at rest, and that, having performed it, he
DEPRECIATION OF THE CURRENCY 83
felt quite satisfied with himself and everybody else ; considered
his duty done, and never dreamed of so adjusting that point
for the future as that the thing could not recur. Let us sup-
pose the Baron to have been continually doing this from day
to day and from year to year — to have been perpetually
patching broken heads with Money, and repairing moral
wrongs with Money, yet leaving the causes of the broken
heads and the moral wrongs in unchecked operation. Agreed
upon these suppositions, we shall probably agree in the con-
clusion that the Baron's estate was not in a promising way ;
that the Baron was a lazy Baron, who would have done far
better to be just than generous; and that the Baron, in this
easy satisfaction of his noble conscience, showed a false idea
of the powers and uses of Money.
Is it possible that we, in England, at the present time, bear
any resemblance to the supposititious and misguided Baron?
Let us inquire.
A year or so ago, there was a court-martial held at Wind-
sor, which attracted the public attention in an unusual man-
ner; not so much because it was conducted in a spirit hardly
reconcileable with the popular prejudice in favour of fair
play, as because it suggested very grave defects in our mili-
tary system, and exhibited us, as to the training of our officers,
in very disadvantageous contrast with other countries. The
result at which that court-martial arrived, was widely re-
garded as absurd and unjust. What were we who held that
opinion, moved by our honest conviction, to do? To bestir
ourselves to amend the system thus exposed? To apply our-
selves to reminding our countrymen that it was fraught with
enormous dangers to us and to our children, and that, in suf-
fering any authorities whatsoever to maintain it, or in allowing
ourselves to be either bullied or cajoled about it, we were
imperilling the institutions under which we live, the national
liberty of which we boast, and the very existence of England
in her place among the nations? Did we go to work to point
out to the unthinking, what our valiant forefathers did for
us, what their resolute spirit won for us, what their earnestness
secured to us, and what we, by allowing work to degenerate
into play, were relaxing our grasp of, every hour? Did
84 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
numbers of us unite into a phalanx of steady purpose, bent
upon impressing these truths upon those who accept the re-
sponsibility of government, and on having them enforced, in
stern and steady practice, through all the vital functions of
Great Britain? No. Not quite that. We were highly in-
dignant, we were a little alarmed; between the two emotions
we were made, for the moment, exceedingly uncomfortable ;
so we relieved our uneasy souls by — giving the subject of the
court-martial, Money. In putting our hands into our pock-
ets and pulling out our five-pound notes, we discharged, as to
that matter, the whole duty of man. The thing was set right,
the country had nothing further to do with it. The sub-
scription amounted, sir, to upwards of Two THOu-sand
POUNDS.
Now, I will assume that the cash could not have been bet-
ter laid out. I will assume that the recipient in every such
case is none the worse for the gift, but is all the more inde-
pendent, high-spirited, and self-reliant. Still I take the lib-
erty of questioning whether I have any right to be satisfied
with my part in that subscription ; whether it is the least dis-
charge of my duty as a citizen ; whether it is not an easy
shirking of my difficult task in that capacity; whether it is
not a miserable compromise leading to the substitution of
sand for rock in the foundations of this kingdom ; whether it
does not exhibit my sacred appreciation of Money, and the
low belief I have within me that it can do anything.
Take another case. Two labouring men leave their work
for half a day (having given notice of their intention before-
hand, and having risen betimes to make amends), and go to
see a review: which review is commended to their fellows and
neighbours as a highly patriotic and loyal sight. Under a
foolish old act of Parliament which nobody but a country
justice would have the kindred foolishness to enforce, the
men are haled before country justices, and committed by those
Brobdingnagian donkeys to jail — illegally, by the bye; but
never mind that. An unconstitutional person in the neigh-
bourhood, making this Bedlamite cruelty known, there arises
a growl of wonder and dissatisfaction from all the other un-
constitutional persons in the country. We try the Home
DEPRECIATION OF THE CURRENCY 85
Secretary, but he 'sees no reason' to reverse the decision —
and how can we expect that he should ; knowing that he never
sees any reason, hears any reason, or utters any reason, for
anything? What do we then? Do we get together and say,
'We really must not in these times allow the labouring men
to live under the impression that this is the spirit of our Law
towards them. We positively must not, cannot, will not, put
such a weapon in the hands of those who tamper with them
constantly. These justices have made it necessary for us to
insist on their dismissal from the bench, as an assurance to the
order so ridiculously oppressed in the persons of these two
men, that the common sense of the country revolts from the
outrage. Furthermore, we must now exert ourselves to pre-
vent other such justices from being intrusted with like pow-
ers, and to take new securities for their moderate and reason-
able exercise.' Is this our course? Why no. What is our
course? We give the two men Money — and there an end
of it.
Try again. A countryman has a little field of wheat which
he reaps upon a Sunday; foreseeing that he will otherwise
have his tiny harvest spoiled. For this black offence he, too,
is had before a country justice of the vast Shallow family,
and is punished by fine. It is to be presumed that, with this
new stimulant upon us, we are roused into an attitude against
the Shallows, which has some faint approach to determina-
tion in it, and that we become resolved to take our laws and
our people out of their hands. But, no. This would occa-
sion us trouble, and we all have our business to attend to, and
have a languid objection to being bored. We put our hands
into our pockets again, and let the obsolete acts of Parlia-
ment and the evergreen Shallows drift us where they may.
It was remarked in these pages, some time ago, that the
raising of a shout of triumph over the enactment of a wretched
little law for the protection of women,1 punishing the great-
est brutes on the earth with six months' imprisonment, surely
suggested that our legislative civilisation must be very im-
perfect and bad. The insufficiency of this puny law, and the
1 See previous article entitled Things that Cannot be Done.
86 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
frequency of the offence against which it is directed, are
matter of public notoriety. Do we take this subject into our
own hands, then ; declare that we will have the severity of the
Law increased; examine the social condition laid bare in such
cases, and plainly avow that we find great numbers of the
people sunk in horrible debasement, and that they must be
got out of it by (among other means), having more human-
ising pleasures provided for them, and better escapes than
gin-shops afforded them from the wretchedness of their ex-
istence ? That they even stand in need of cheerful relief with-
out the Cant of instruction, and that Marlborough House it-
self, may be but a solemn nightmare to legions who, neverthe-
less, pay taxes, and have souls to be saved? Do we leave
off blinking the real question, and manfully say, 'We find the
existence of these people — men, women and children, all alike
— to be most deplorable, and, as matters stand, we really do
not know what it is made easy for them to do when they are
not at work, but to lurk, and sot, and quarrel, and fight?'
All of us who know anything of the facts know this to be
GOD'S truth ; but, instead of asserting it, we send five shillings'
worth of postage stamps to the police magistrate for the re-
lief of the last unhappy woman who has been half -murdered ;
and go to church next Sunday with the adhesive plaster of
those sixty queen's heads, binding up oar rickety consciences.
Neither is it we alone, the body of the people, who have
this base recourse to Money as a healing balm on all occa-
sions. The leaders who carry the banners we engage to fol-
low, set us the example, and do the same. The last Thanks-
giving Day was not so long ago but that we may all remem-
ber the advertising columns of the newspapers about that
time, and the desirable opportunities they offered for devout
investment. It was clear to the originators of those adver-
tisements, manifest to the whole tribe of Moses (and Sons)
who published those decorous appeals — that we must coin our
thankful feelings into Money. If we wanted another vic-
tory, we could not hope to get it for nothing, or on credit, but
must come down with our ready Money. There was not a
church-organ unpaid for, not a beadle's cocked hat and blush-
ing breeches for which church-wardens were responsible, not
INSULARITIES 87
a chapel painting and glazing job, on any painters' and
glaziers' books, but we were called upon to liquidate that ob-
ligation, and get a ticket in return, entitling us to the other
side of Sebastopol. And we paid the money and took the
ticket. Hosts of us did so. We paid the balance due upon
that organ, we settled the bill for the cocked hat and blushing
breeches, we settled the account of the painter and glazier,
and we felt, in the vulgar phrase, that we had gone and been
and done it.
So many of us parted with our small change to clear off
these scores, because we found it much easier to pay the fine
than undertake the service. The service required of us was
severe. Paralysis had disclosed itself in the heart and brain
of our administration of affairs ; favour and dull routine were
all in all, merit and exigency were nothing. A class had got
possession of our strength, and made it weakness ; and three-
quarters of the globe stood looking on with a rather keen
interest in the wonderful sight. The service demanded of us
by the crisis, was the recovery of our strength through stead-
fastness in what was plainly right, and overthrow of what was
plainly wrong. The service was difficult, ungentlemanly, un-
popular in good society ; and we paid the fine with pleasure.
But if every man drawn in a conscription paid a fine in-
stead of going for a soldier, the country in which that hap-
pened would have no defenders. There are fights not fought
by soldiers, O my countrymen, and they are no less necessary
to the defence of a country, and the conscription for that
war is on every one of us. Money is great, but it is not
omnipotent. All the Money that could be piled up between
this and the moon would not fill the place of one little grain of
duty.
INSULARITIES
[JANUARY 19, 1856]
IT is more or less the habit of every country — more or less
commendable in every case — to exalt itself and its institutions
above every other country, and be vain-glorious. Out of the
88 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
partialities thus engendered and maintained, there has arisen
A great deal of patriotism, and a great deal of public spirit.
On the other hand, it is of paramount importance to every na-
tion that its boastfulness should not generate prejudice, con-
ventionality, and a cherishing of unreasonable ways of act-
ing and thinking, which have nothing in them deserving of
respect, but are ridiculous or wrong.
We English people, owing in a great degree to our in-
sular position, and in a small degree to the facility with which
we have permitted electioneering lords and gentlemen to pre-
tend to think for us, and to represent our weaknesses to us
as our strength, have been in particular danger of contracting
habits which we will call for our present purpose, Insularities.
Our object in this paper, is to string together a few exam-
ples.
On the continent of Europe, generally, people dress accord-
ing to their personal convenience and inclinations. In that
capital which is supposed to set the fashion in affairs of dress,
there is an especial independence in this regard. If a man
in Paris have an idiosyncrasy on the subject of any article of
attire between his hat and his boots, he gratifies it without the
least idea that it can be anybody's affair but his ; nor does
anybody else make it his affair. If, indeed, there be anything
obviously convenient or tasteful in the peculiarity, then it
soon ceases to be a peculiarity, and is adopted by others. If
not, it is let alone. In the meantime, the commonest man
in the streets does not consider it at all essential to his char-
acter as a true Frenchman, that he should howl, stare, jeer, or
otherwise make himself offensive to the author of the innova-
tion. That word has ceased to be Old Boguey to him since
he ceased to be a serf, and he leaves the particular sample of
innovation to come in or go out upon its merits.
Our strong English prejudice against anything of this
kind that is new to the eye, forms one of our decided insulari-
ties. It is disappearing before the extended knowledge of
other countries consequent upon steam and electricity, but it
is not gone yet. The hermetically-sealed, black, stiff, chim-
ney-pot, a foot and a half high, which we call a hat, is gen-
erally admitted to be neither convenient nor graceful; but,
INSULARITIES 89
there are very few middle-aged gentlemen within two hours'
reach of the Royal Exchange, who would bestow their daugh-
ters on wide-awakes, however estimable the wearers. Smith
Payne and Smith, or Ransom and Co., would probably con-
sider a run upon the house not at all unlikely, in the event
of their clerks coming to business in caps, or with such felt-
fashions on their heads as didn't give them the headache, and
as they could wear comfortably and cheaply. During the
dirt and wet of at least half the year in London, it would be a
great comfort and a great saving of expense to a large class
of persons, to wear the trousers gathered up about the leg, as
a Zouave does, with a long gaiter below — to shift which, is
to shift the whole mud-incumbered part of the dress, and to be
dry, and clean directly. To such clerks, and others with
much out-door work to do, as could afford it, Jack-boots, a
much more costly article, would, for similar reasons, be excel-
lent wear. But what would Griggs and Bodger say to Jack-
boots? They would say, 'This sort of thing, sir, is not the
sort of thing the house has been accustomed to, you will bring
the house into the Gazette, you must ravel out four inches of
trousers daily, sir, or you must go.'
Some years ago, we, the writer, not being in Griggs and
Bodger's, took the liberty of buying a great-coat which we
saw exposed for sale in the Burlington Arcade, London, and
which appeared to be in our eyes the most sensible great-coat
we had ever seen. Taking the further liberty to wear this
great-coat after we had bought it, we became a sort of Spec-
tre, eliciting the wonder and terror of our fellow creatures
as we flitted along the streets. We accompanied the coat to
Switzerland for six months; and, although it was perfectly
new there, we found it was not regarded as a portent of the
least importance. We accompanied it to Paris for another
six months ; and, although it was perfectly new there too,
nobody minded it. This coat so intolerable to Britain, was
nothing more nor less than the loose wide-sleeved mantle, easy
to put on, easy to put off, and crushing nothing beneath it,
which everybody now wears.
During hundreds of years, it was the custom in England
to wear beards. It became, in course of time, one of our
90
Insularities to shave close. Whereas, in almost all the othe*
countries of Europe, more or less of moustache and beard
was habitually worn, it came to be established in this speck
of an island, as an Insularity from which there was no appeal,
that an Englishman, whether he liked it or not, must hew,
hack, and rasp his chin and upper lip daily. The incon-
venience of this infallible test of British respectability was so
widely felt, that fortunes were made by razors, razor-strops,
hones, pastes, shaving-soaps, emollients for the soothing of the
tortured skin, all sorts of contrivances to lessen the misery
of the shaving process and diminish the amount of time it
occupied. This particular Insularity even went some miles
further on the broad highway of Nonsense than other In-
sularities; for it not only tabooed unshorn civilians, but
claimed for one particular and very limited military class
the sole right to dispense with razors as to their upper lips.
We ventured to suggest in this journal that the prohibi-
tion was ridiculous, and to show some reasons why it was
ridiculous. The Insularity having no sense in it, has since
been losing ground every day.
One of our most remarkable Insularities is a tendency to be
firmly persuaded that what is not English is not natural. In
the Fine Arts department of the French Exhibition, re-
cently closed, we repeatedly heard, even from the more
educated and reflective of our countrymen, that certain
pictures which appeared to possess great merit — of which
not the lowest item was, that they possessed the merit of a
vigorous and bold Idea — were all very well, but were 'theat-
rical.' Conceiving the difference between a dramatic picture
and a theatrical picture, to be, that in the former case a
story is strikingly told, without apparent consciousness of
a spectator, and that in the latter case the groups are obtru-
sively conscious of a spectator, and are obviously dressed
up, and doing (or not doing) certain things with an
eye to the spectator, and not for the sake of the story;
we sought in vain for this defect. Taking further
pains then, to find out what was meant by the term theatrical,
we found that the actions and gestures of the figures were not
English. That is to say, — the figures expressing themselves
INSULARITIES 91
in the vivacious manner natural in a greater or less degree
to the whole great continent of Europe, were overcharged
and out of the truth, because they did not express them-
selves in the manner of our little Island — which is so very
exceptional, that it always places an Englishman at a dis-
advantage, out of his own country, until his fine sterling
qualities shine through his external formality and con-
straint. Surely nothing can be more unreasonable, say, than
that we should require a Frenchman of the days of Robes-
pierre, to be taken out of his jail to the guillotine with the
calmness of Clapham or the respectability of Richmond Hill,
after a trial at the Central Criminal Court in eighteen hun-
dred and fifty-six. And yet this exactly illustrates the re-
quirement of the particular Insularity under consideration.
When shall we get rid of the Insularity of being afraid
to make the most of small resources, and the best of scanty
means of enjoyment? In Paris (as in innumerable other
places and countries) a man who has six square feet of yard,
or six square feet of housetop, adorns it in his own poor
way, and sits there in the fine weather because he likes to
do it, because he chooses to do it, because he has got
nothing better of his own, and has never been laughed
out of the enjoyment of what he has got. Equally, he
will sit at his door, or in his balcony, or out on the
pavement, because it is cheerful and pleasant and he
likes to see the life of the city. For the last seventy
years his family have not been tormenting their lives with
continual enquiries and speculations whether other families,
above and below, to the right and to the left, over the way
and round the corner, would consider these recreations gen-
teel, or would do the like, or would not do the like. That
abominable old Tyrant, Madame Grundy, has never been of
his acquaintance. The result is, that, with a very small
income and in a very dear city, he has more innocent pleasure
than fifty Englishmen of the same condition; and is dis-
tinctly, in spite of our persuasion to the contrary (another
Insularity !) a more domestic man than the Englishman, in
regard of his simple pleasures being, to a much greater ex-
tent, divided with his wife and children. It is a natural con-
92 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
sequence of their being easy and cheap, and profoundly
independent of Madame Grundy.
But, this Insularity rests, not to the credit of England,
on a more palpable foundation than perhaps any other. The
old school of Tory writers did so pertinaciously labour to
cover all easily available recreations and cheap reliefs from
the monotony of common life, with ridicule and contempt,
that great numbers of the English people got scared into
being dull, and are only now beginning to recover their cour-
age. The object of these writers, when they had any object
beyond an insolent disparagement of the life-blood of the
nation, was to jeer the weaker members of the middle class
into making themselves a poor fringe on the skirts of the class.
above them, instead of occupying their own honest, honour-
able, independent place. Unfortunately they succeeded only
too well, and to this grievous source may be traced many of
our present political ills. In no country but England have
the only means and scenes of relaxation within the reach of
some million or two of people been systematically lampooned
and derided. This disgraceful Insularity exists no longer.
Still, some weak traces of its contemptuous spirit may occa-
sionally be found, even in very unlikely places. The accom-
plished Mr. Macaulay, in the third volume of his brilliant
History writes loftily about 'the thousands of clerks and mil-
liners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch
Katrine and Loch Lomond.' No such responsible gentle-
man, in France or Germany, writing history — writing any-
thing— would think it fine to sneer at any inoffensive and
useful class of his fellow subjects. If the clerks and
milliners — who pair off arm in arm, by thousands, for Loch
Katrine and Loch Lomond, to celebrate the Early Closing
Movement, we presume — will only imagine their presence
poisoning those waters to the majestic historian as he roves
along the banks, looking for Whig Members of Parliament
to sympathise with him in admiration of the beauties of
Nature, we think they will be amply avenged in the absurdity
of the picture.
Not one of our Insularities is so astonishing in the eyes of
an intelligent foreigner, as the Court Newsman. He is one
INSULARITIES 93
of the absurd little obstructions perpetually in the way of our
being understood abroad. The quiet greatness and independ-
ence of the national character seems so irreconcileable with
its having any satisfaction in the dull slipslop about the
slopes and the gardens, and about the Prince Consort's going
a-hunting and coming back to lunch, and about Mr. Gibbs
and the ponies, and about the Royal Highnesses on horse-
back and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise, and
about the slopes and the gardens again, and the Prince Con-
sort again, and Mr. Gibbs and the ponies again, and the
Royal Highnesses on horseback again, and the Royal infants
taking carriage exercise again, and so on for every day in the
week and every week in the year, that in questions of impor-
tance the English as a people, really miss their just recogni-
tion. Similar small beer is chronicled with the greatest care
about the nobility in their country-houses. It is in vain to
represent that the English people don't care about these insig-
nificant details, and don't want them ; that aggravates the mis-
understanding. If they don't want them, why do they have
them? If they feel the effect of them to be ridiculous, why
do they consent to be made ridiculous? If they can't help
it, why, then the bewildered foreigner submits that he was
right at first, and that it is not the English people that is
the power, but Lord Aberdeen, or Lord Palmerston, or Lord
Aldborough, or Lord Knowswhom.
It is an Insularity well worth general consideration and
correction, that the English people are wanting in self-
respect. It would be difficult to bear higher testimony to
the merits of the English aristocracy than they themselves
afford in not being very arrogant or intolerant, with so large
a public always ready to abase themselves before titles. On
all occasions, public and private, where the opportunity is
afforded, this readiness is to be observed. So long as it
obtains so widely, it is impossible that we should be justly
appreciated and comprehended, by those who have the great-
est part in ruling us. And thus it happens that now we are
facetiously pooh-poohed by our Premier in the English
capital, and now the accredited representatives of our arts
and sciences are disdainfully slighted by our Ambassador
94 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
in the French capital, and we wonder to find ourselves in
such curious and disadvantageous comparison with the people
of other countries. Those people may, through many
causes, be less fortunate and less free; but, they have more
social self-respect: and that self-respect must, through all
their changes, be deferred to, and will assert itself. We
apprehend that few persons are disposed to contend that
Rank does not receive its due share of homage on the conti-
nent of Europe ; but, between the homage it receives there,
and the homage it receives in our island, there is an immense
difference. Half a dozen dukes and lords, at an English
county ball, or public dinner, or any tolerably miscellaneous
gathering, are painful and disagreeable company; not be-
cause they have any disposition unduly to exalt themselves,
or are generally otherwise than cultivated and polite gentle-
men, but, because too many of us are prone to twist ourselves
out of shape before them, into contortions of servility and
adulation. Elsewhere, Self-respect usually steps in to pre-
vent this; there is much less toadying and tuft-hunting;
and the intercourse between the two orders is infinitely more
agreeable to both, and far more edifying to both.
It is one of our Insularities, if we have a royal or titled
visitor among us, to use expressions of slavish adulation in
our public addresses that have no response in the heart of
any breathing creature, and to encourage the diffusion of
details respecting such visitor's devout behaviour at church,
courtly behaviour in reception-rooms, decent behaviour at
dinner-tables, implying previous acquaintance with the uses
of knife, fork, spoon, and wine-glass, — which would really
seem to denote that we had expected Orson. These doubt-
ful compliments are paid nowhere else, and would not be paid
by us if we had a little more self-respect. Through our
intercourse with other nations, we cannot too soon import
some. And when we have left off representing, fifty times a
day, to the King of Brentford and the Chief Tailor of Tooley
Street, that their smiles are necessary to our existence, those
two magnificent persons will begin to doubt whether they
really are so, and we shall have begun to get rid of another
Insularity.
A NIGHTLY SCENE IN LONDON 95
[JANUARY 26, 1856]
ON the fifth of last November, I, the Conductor of this
journal, accompanied by a friend well-known to the public,
accidentally strayed into Whitechapel. It was a miserable
evening; very dark, very muddy, and raining hard.
There are many woful sights in that part of London, and
it has been well-known to me in most of its aspects for many
years. We had forgotten the mud and rain in slowly walk-
ing along and looking about us, when we found ourselves, at
eight o'clock, before the Workhouse.
Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark
street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining
upon them were five bundles of rags. They were motionless,
and had no resemblance to the human form. Five great
beehives, covered with rags — five dead bodies taken out of
graves, tied neck and heels, and covered with rags —
would have looked like those five bundles upon which the
rain rained down in the public street.
'What is this !' said my companion. 'What is this !'
'Some miserable people shut out of the Casual Ward, I
think,' said I.
We had stopped before the five ragged mounds, and were
quite rooted to the spot by their horrible appearance. Five
awful Sphinxes by the wayside, crying to every passer-by,
'Stop and guess ! What is to be the end of a state of society
that leaves us here !'
As we stood looking at them, a decent working-man, having
the appearance of a stone-mason, touched me on the shoulder.
'This is an awful sight, sir,' said he, 'in a Christian coun-
try!'
'Goo knows it is, my friend,' said I.
'I have often seen it much worse than this, as I have been
going home from my work. I have counted fifteen, twenty,,
five-and-twenty, many a time. It 's a shocking thing to see.'
'A shocking thing indeed,' said I and my companion
96 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
together. The man lingered near us a little while, wished
us good-night, and went on.
We should have felt it brutal in us who had a better
ehance of being heard than the working-man, to leave the
thing as it was, so we knocked at the Workhouse Gate. I
undertook to be spokesman. The moment the gate was
opened by an old pauper, I went in, followed close by my
companion. I lost no time in passing the old porter, for I
saw in his watery eye a disposition to shut us out.
'Be so good as to give that card to the master of the
Workhouse, and say I shall be glad to speak to him for a
moment.'
We were in a kind of covered gateway, and the old porter
went across it with the card. Before he had got to a door
on our left, a man in a cloak and hat bounced out of it
very sharply, as if he were in the nightly habit of being
bullied and of returning the compliment.
'Now, gentlemen,' said he in a loud voice, 'what do you
want here?'
'First,' said I 'will you do me the favour to look at that
card in your hand. Perhaps you may know my name.'
'Yes,' says he, looking at it. 'I know this name.'
'Good. I only want to ask you a plain question in a civil
manner, and there is not the least occasion for either of us
to be angry. It would be very foolish in me to blame you,
and I don't blame you. I may find fault with the system
you administer, but pray understand that I know you are
here to do a duty pointed out to you, and that I have no
doubt you do it. Now, I hope you won't object to tell me
what I want to know.'
'No,' said he, quite mollified, and very reasonable, 'not at
all. What is it?'
'Do you know that there are five wretched creatures out-
side?'
'I haven't seen them, but I dare say there are.'
'Do you doubt that there are ?'
'No, not at all. There might be many more.'
'Are they men ? Or women ?'
A NIGHTLY SCENE IN LONDON 97
'Women, I suppose. Very likely one or two of them were
there last night, and the night before last.*
'There all night, do you mean?'
'Very likely.'
My companion and I looked at one another, and the
master of the Workhouse added quickly, 'Why, Lord bless
my soul, what am I to do? What can I do? The place is
full. The place is always full — every night. I must give
the preference to women with children, mustn't I? You
wouldn't have me not do that?'
'Surely not,' said I. 'It is a very humane principle, and
quite right ; and I am glad to hear of it. Don't forget that
I don't blame you.'
'Well !' said he. And subdued himself again.
'What I want to ask you,' I went on, 'is whether you know
anything against those five miserable beings outside?'
'Don't know anything about them,' said he, with a wave of
his arm.
'I ask, for this reason: that we mean to give them a
trifle to get a lodging — if they are not shelterless because
they are thieves for instance. — You don't know them to be
thieves ?'
'I don't know anything about them,' he repeated emphat-
ically.
'That is to say, they are shut out, solely because the Ward
is full?'
'Because the Ward is full.'
'And if they got in, they would only have a roof for the
night and a bit of bread in the morning, I suppose?'
'That 's all. You '11 use your own discretion about what
you give them. Only understand that I don't know anything
about them beyond what I have told you.'
'Just so. I wanted to know no more. You have answered
my questions civilly and readily, and I am much obliged to
you. I have nothing to say against you, but quite the con-
trary. Good-night !'
'Good-night, gentlemen !' And out we came again.
We went to the ragged bundle nearest to the Workhouse-
98 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
door, and I touched it. No movement replying, I gently
shook it. The rags began to be slowly stirred within, and
by little and little a head was unshrouded. The head of a
young woman of three or four and twenty, as I should judge ;
gaunt with want, and foul with dirt; but not naturally ugly.
'Tell us,' said I, stooping down. 'Why are you lying
here?'
'Because I can't get into the Workhouse.'
She spoke in a faint dull way, and had no curiosity or
interest left. She looked dreamily at the black sky and the
falling rain, but never looked at me or my companion.
'Were you here last night?'
'Yes. All last night. And the night afore too.'
'Do you know any of these others?'
'I know her next but one. She was here last night, and she
told me she come out of Essex. I don't know no more of
her.'
'You were here all last night, but you have not been here
all day?'
'No. Not all day.'
'Where have you been all day?'
'About the streets.'
'What have you had to eat?'
'Nothing.'
'Come!' said I. 'Think a little. You are tired and have
been asleep, and don't quite consider what you are saying
to us. You have had something to eat to-day. Come !
Think of it!'
'No I haven't. Nothing but such bits as I could pick up
about the market. Why, look at me!'
She bared her neck, and I covered it up again.
'If you had a shilling to get some supper and a lodging,
should you know where to get it?'
'Yes. I could do that.'
'For GOD'S sake get it then !'
I put the money into her hand, and she feebly rose up and
went away. She never thanked me, never looked at me —
melted away into the miserable night, in the strangest manner
I ever saw. I have seen many strange things, but not on£
A NIGHTLY SCENE IN LONDON 99
that has left a deeper impression on my memory than the
dull impassive way in which that worn-out heap of misery
took that piece of money, and was lost.
One by one I spoke to all the five. In every one, interest
and curiosity were extinct as in the first. They were all dull
and languid. No one made any sort of profession or com-
plaint ; no one cared to look at me ; no one thanked me. When
I came to the third, I suppose she saw that my companion and
I glanced, with a new horror upon us, at the two last, who
had dropped against each other in their sleep, and were lying
like broken images. She said, she believed they were young
sisters. These were the only words that were originated
among the five.
And now let me close this terrible account with a redeeming
and beautiful trait of the poorest of the poor. When we
came out of the Workhouse, we had gone across the road to
a public house, finding ourselves without silver, to get change
for a sovereign. I held the money in my hand while I was
speaking to the five apparitions. Our being so engaged, at-
tracted the attention of many people of the very poor sort
usual to that place ; as we leaned over the mounds of rags, they
eagerly leaned over us to see and hear; what I had in my
hand, and what I said, and what I did, must have been plain
to nearly all the concourse. When the last of the five had
got up and faded away, the spectators opened to let us pass ;
and not one of them, by word or look, or gesture, begged of
us. Many of the observant faces were quick to know that it
would have been a relief to us to have got rid of the rest of
the money with any hope of doing good with it. But, there
was a feeling among them all, that their necessities were not
to be placed by the side of such a spectacle ; and they opened
a way for us in profound silence, and let us go.
My companion wrote to me, next day, that the five ragged
bundles had been upon his bed all night. I debated how to
add our testimony to that of many other persons who from
time to time are impelled to write to the newspapers, by
having come upon some shameful and shocking sight of this
description. I resolved to write in these pages an exact
account of what we had seen, but to wait until after Christ-
100 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
mas, in order that there might be no heat or haste. I know
that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, de-
mented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy
beyond all bounds of sense (not to speak of such a weakness
as humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every
case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that
no man has any business to mind them. Without disparaging
those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce
and abominate them in their insanity ; and I address people
with a respect for the spirit of the New Testament, who do
mind such things, and who think them infamous in our
streets.
THE FRIEND OF THE LIONS
[FEBRUARY 2, 1856]
WE are in the studio of a friend of ours, whose knowledge of
all kinds of Beasts and Birds has never been surpassed, and to
whose profound acquaintance with the whole Animal King-
dom, every modern picture-gallery and every print-shop, at
home and abroad, bears witness. We have been wanted by
our friend as a model for a Rat-catcher. We feel much
honoured, and are sitting to him in that distinguished ca-
pacity, with an awful Bulldog much too near us.
Our friend is, as might be expected, the particular friend
of the Lions in the Zoological Gardens, Regent's Park, Lon-
don. On behalf of that Royal Family dear to his heart, he
offers — standing painting away at his easel, with his own
wonderful vigour and ease — a few words of friendly remon-
strance to the Zoological Society.
You are an admirable society (says our friend, throwing
in, now a bit of our head, and now a bit of the Bulldog's),
and you have done wonders. You are a society that has
established in England, a national menagerie of the most
beautiful description, and that has placed it freely and in a
spirit deserving of the highest commendation within the reach
of the great body of the people. You are a society rendering
THE FRIEND OF THE LIONS 101
a real service and advantage to the public, and always most
sensibly and courteously represented by your excellent
Mitchell.
Then why (proceeds our friend), don't you treat your
Lions better?
In the earnestness of his enquiry, our friend looks harder
than usual at the Bulldog. The Bulldog immediately droops
and becomes embarrassed. All dogs feel that our friend
knows all their secrets, and that it is utterly hopeless to at-
tempt to take him in. The last base action committed by
this Bulldog is on his conscience, the moment our friend
fixes him. 'What? You did, eh?* says our friend to the
Bulldog. The Bulldog licks his lips with the greatest nervous-
ness, winks his red eyes, balances himself afresh on his bandy
forelegs, and becomes a spectacle of dejection. He is as
little like his vagabond self, as that remarkable breed which
the French call a bouledogue.
Your birds (says our friend, resuming his work, and ad-
dressing himself again to the Zoological Society), are as
happy as the day is — he was about to add, long, but glances
at the light and substitutes — short. Their natural habits are
perfectly understood, their structure is well-considered, and
they have nothing to desire. Pass from your birds to those
members of your collection whom Mr. Rogers used to call,
'our poor relations.' Of course I mean the monkeys. They
have an artificial climate carefully prepared for them. They
have the blessing of congenial society carefully secured to
them. They are among their own tribes and connexions.
They have shelves to skip upon, and pigeon-holes to creep
into. Graceful ropes dangle from the upper beams of their
sitting-rooms, by which they swing, for their own enjoyment,
the fascination of the fair sex, and the instruction of the
enquiring minds of the rising generation. Pass from our
poor relations to that beast, the Hippopotamus — What do
you mean?
The last enquiry is addressed, not to the Zoological So-
ciety, but to the Bulldog, who has deserted his position, and
is sneaking away. Passing his brush to the left thumb on
which he holds his palette, our friend leisurely walks up to
the Bulldog, and slaps his face! Even we, whose faith is
great, expect to see him next moment with the Bulldog
hanging on to his nose; but, the Bulldog is abjectly polite,
and would even wag his tail if it had not been bitten off in
his infancy.
Pass, I was saying (coolly pursues our friend at his easel
again), from our poor relations to that impersonation of
sensuality, the Hippopotamus. How do you provide for
him? Could he find, on the banks of the Nile, such a villa as
you have built for him on the banks of the Regent's canal?
Could he find, in his native Egypt, an appropriately furnished
drawing-room, study, bath, wash-house, and spacious pleasure-
ground, all en suite, and always ready? I think not. Now,
I beseech your managing committee and your natural philoso-
phers, to come with me and look at the Lions.
Here, our friend seizes a piece of charcoal and instantly
produces, on a new canvas standing on another easel near, a
noble Lion and Lioness. The Bulldog (who deferentially
resumed his position after having his face slapped), looks on
in manifest uneasiness, lest this new proceeding should have
something to do with him.
There ! says our friend, throwing the charcoal away, there
they are! The majestic King and Queen of quadrupeds.
The British Lion is no longer a fictitious creature in the
British coat of arms. You produce your British Lion every
year from this roya* couple. And how, with all the vast
amount of resources, knowledge, and experience at your com-
mand, how do you treat these your great attractions? From
day to day, I find the noble creatures patiently wearing out
their weary lives in narrow spaces where they have hardly room
to turn, and condemned to face in the roughest weather a bit-
ter Nor'-Westerly aspect. Look at those wonderfully-con-
structed feet, with their exquisite machinery for alighting
from springs and leaps. What do you conceive to be the
kind of ground to which those feet are, in the great fore-
sight of Nature, least adapted? Bare, smooth, hard boards,
perhaps, like the deck of a ship? Yes. A strange reason
why you should choose that and no other flooring for their
dens !
THE FRIEND OF THE LIONS 103
Why, Heaven preserve us ! ( cries our friend, frightening
the Bulldog very much) do any of you keep a cat? Will any
of you do me the favour to watch a cat in a field or garden, on
a bright sunshiny day — how she crouches in the mould, rolls
in the sand, basks in the grass, delights to vary the surface
upon which she rests, and change the form of the substance
upon which she takes her ease. Compare such surfaces and
substances with the one uniform, unyielding, unnatural, un-
elastic, inappropriate piece of human carpentry upon which
these beautiful animals, with their vexed faces, pace and re-
pace, and pass each other two hundred and fifty times an
hour.
It is really incomprehensible (our friend proceeds), in you
who should be so well acquainted with animals, to call these
boards — or that other uncomfortable boarded object like a
Mangle with the inside taken out — a Bed, for creatures with
these limbs and these habits. That, a Bed for a Lion and
Lioness, which does not even give them a chance of being
bruised in a new place? Learn of your cat again, and see
how she goes to bed. Did you ever find her, or any living
creature, go to bed, without re-arranging to the whim and
sensation of the moment, the materials of the bed itself?
Don't you, the Zoological Society, punch and poke your pil-
lows, and settle into suitable places in your beds? Consider
then, what thf discomfort of these magnificent brutes must be,
to whom you leave no diversity of choice, no power of new ar-
rangement, and as to whose unchanging and unyielding beds
you begin with a form and substance that have no parallel
in their natural lives. If you doubt the pain they must
endure, go to museums and colleges where the bones of lions
and other animals of the feline tribe who have lived in cap-
tivity under similar circumstances, are preserved; and you
will find them thickly encrusted with a granulated substance,
the result of long lying upon unnatural and uncomfortable
planes.
I will not be so pressing as to the feeding of my Royal
Friends (pursues the Master), but even there I think you arc
wrong. You may rely upon it, that the best regulated fami-
lies of Lions and Lionesses don't dine every day punctually at
104 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the same hour, in their natural state, and don't alwa}rs keep the
same kind and quantity of meat in the larder. However, I
will readily waive that question of board, if you will only
abandon the other.
The time of the sitting being out, our friend takes his pal-
ette from his thumb, lays it aside with his brush, ceases to ad-
dress the Zoological Society, and releases the Bulldog and my-
self. Having occasion to look closely at the Bulldog's chest,
he turns that model over as if he were made of clay ( if I were
to touch him with my little finger he would pin me instantly),
and examines him without the smallest regard to his per-
sonal wishes or convenience. The Bulldog, having humbly
submitted, is shown to the door.
'Eleven precisely, to-morrow,' says our friend, 'or it will
be the worse for you.' The Bulldog respectfully slouches
out. Looking out of the window, I presently see him going
across the garden, accompanied by a particular!}' ill-looking
proprietor with a black eye — my prototype I presume — again
a ferocious and audacious Bulldog, who will evidently kill
some other dog before he gets home.
WHY?
[MARCH 1, 1856]
I AM going to ask a few questions which frequently present
themselves to my mind. I am not going to ask them with any
expectation of getting an answer, but in the comforting hope
that I shall find some thousands of sympathising readers,
whose minds are constantly asking similar questions.
Why does a young woman of prepossessing appearance,
glossy hair, and neat attire, taken from any station of life
and put behind the counter of a Refreshment Room on an
English Railroad, conceive the idea that her mission in life is
to treat me with scorn? Why does she disdain my plaintive
and respectful solicitations for portions of pork-pie or cups
of tea? Why does she feed me like a hytena? What have I
done to incur the young lady's displeasure? Is it, that I
WHY? 105
nave come there to be refreshed? It is strange that she should
take that ill, because her vocation would be gone if I and
my fellow-travellers did not appear before her, suing in hu-
mility to be allowed to lay out a little money. Yet I never
offered her any other injury. Then, why does she wound
my sensitive nature by being so dreadfully cross to me? She
has relations, friends, acquaintances, with whom to quarrel.
Why does she pick me out for her natural enemy ?
When a Reviewer or other Writer has crammed himself to
choking with some particularly abstruse piece of information,
why does he introduce it with the casual remark, that 'every
schoolboy knows' it? He didn't know it himself last week;
why is it indispensable that he should let off this introductory
cracker among his readers? We have a vast number of ex-
traordinary fictions in common use, but this fiction of the
schoolboy is the most unaccountable to me of all. It sup-
poses the schoolboy to know everything. The schoolboy
knows the exact distance, to an inch, from the moon to
Uranus. The schoolboy knows every conceivable quotation
from the Greek and Latin authors. The schoolboy is up at
present, and has been these two years, in the remotest corners
of the maps of Russia and Turkey ; previously to which dis-
play of his geographical accomplishments he had been on the
most intimate terms with the whole of the gold regions of Aus-
tralia. If there were a run against the monetary system of the
country to-morrow, we should find this prodigy of a schoolboy
down upon us "with the deepest mysteries of banking and the
currency. We have nearly got rid of the Irishman who
stood by us so long, and did so much public service, by
enabling the narrators of facetious anecdotes to introduce
them with 'As the Irishman said.' We have quite got rid
of the Frenchman who was for many years in partnership
with him. Are we never, on any terms, to get rid of the
schoolboy ?
If the Court Circular be a sacred institution for the edifi-
cation of a free people, why is the most abhorred villain
always invested, in right of that frightful distinction, with
a Court Circular of his own? Why am I always to be told
about the ruffian's pleasant manners, his easy ways, his agree-
106 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
able smile, his affable talk, the profound conviction of his
innocence that he blandly wafts into the soft bosoms of guile-
less lambs and turnkeys, the orthodox air with which he comes
and goes, with his Bible and prayer-book in his hand, along
the yard, that I fervently hope may have no outlet for him
but the gallows? Why am I to be dosed and drenched with
these nauseous particulars, in the case of every wretch suffi-
ciently atrocious to become their subject? Why am I sup-
posed never to know all about it beforehand, and never to
have been pelted with similar mud in my life? Has not the
whole detestable programme been presented to me without
variation, fifty times? Am I not familiar with every line of
it, from its not being generally known that Sharmer was much
respected in the County of Blankshire, down to the virtuous
heat of Bilkins, Sharmer's counsel, when, in his eloquent ad-
dress, he cautions the jurymen about laying their heads on
their pillows, and is moved to pious wrath by the wicked
predisposition of human nature to object to the foulest mur-
der that its faculties can imagine? Why, why, why, must I
have the Newgate Court Circular over and over again, as if
the genuine Court Circular were not enough to make me
modestly independent, proud, grateful, and happy?
When I overhear my friend Blackdash inquire of my friend
Asterisk whether he knows Sir Giles Scroggins, why does
Asterisk reply, provisionally and with limitation, that he has
met him? Asterisk knows as well as I do, that he has no
acquaintance with Sir Giles Scroggins ; why does he hesitate
to say so, point blank? A man may not even know Sir Giles
Scroggins by sight, yet be a man for a* that. A man may
distinguish himself, without the privity and aid of Sir Giles
Scroggins. It is even supposed by some that a man may get
to Heaven without being introduced by Sir Giles Scroggins.
Then why not come out with the bold declaration, 'I really
do not know Sir Giles Scroggins, and I have never found that
eminent person in the least necessary to my existence?'
When I go to the Play, why must I find everything con-
ventionally done — reference to nature discharged, and refer-
ence to stage-usage the polar star of the dramatic art ? Why
does the baron, or the general, or the venerable steward, or
WHY? 107
the amiable old farmer, talk about his chee-ilde? He knows
of no such thing as a chee-ilde anywhere else ; what business
has he with a chee-ilde on the boards alone ? I never knew an
old gentleman to hug himself with his left arm, fall into a
comic fit of delirium tremens, and say to his son, 'Damme, you
dog, will you marry her?' Yet, the moment I see an old gen-
tleman on the stage with a small cape to his coat, I know of
course that this will infallibly happen. Now, why should I
be under the obligation to be always entertained by this spec-
tacle, however refreshing, and why should I never be sur-
prised?
Why have six hundred men been trying through several
generations to fold their arms? The last twenty Parliaments
have directed their entire attention to this graceful art. I
have heard it frequently declared by individual senators that
a certain ex-senator still producible, 'folded his arms better
than any man in the house.' I have seen aspirants inflamed
with a lofty ambition, studying through the whole sessions
the folded arms on the Treasury Bench, and trying to fold
their arms according to the patterns there presented. I have
known neophytes far more distracted about the folding of
their arms than about the enunciation of their political views,
or the turning of their periods. The injury inflicted on the
nation by Mr. Canning, when he folded his arms and got his
portrait taken, is not to be calculated. Every member of
Parliament from that hour to the present has been trying to
fold his arms. It is a graceful, a refined, a decorative art;
but, I doubt if its results will bear comparison with the in-
finite pains and charges bestowed upon its cultivation.
Why are we so fond of talking about ourselves as 'emi-
nently a practical people?' Are we eminently a practical
people? In our national works, for example; our public
buildings, our public places, our columns, the lines of our
new streets, our monstrous statues ; do we come so very prac-
tically out of all that? No, to be sure; but we have our
railroads, results of private enterprise, and they are great
works. Granted. Yet, is it very significant of an eminently
practical people that we live under a system which wasted
hundreds of thousands of pounds in law and corruption, be-
108 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
fore an inch of those roads could be made ! Is it a striking
proof of an eminently practical people having invested their
wealth in making them, that in point of money return, in
point of public accommodation, in every particular of com-
fort, profit, and management, they are at a heavy discount
when compared with the railways on the opposite side of a
sea-channel five-and-twenty miles across, though those were
made under all the disadvantages consequent upon unstable
governments and shaken public confidence? Why do we
brag so ? If an inhabitant of some other sphere were to light
upon our earth in the neighbourhood of Norwich, were to
take a first-class ticket to London, were to attend an Eastern
Counties' Railway meeting in Bishopsgate Street, were to go
down from London Bridge to Dover, cross to Calais, travel
from Calais to Marseilles, and be furnished with an accurate
statement of the railway cost and profit on either side of the
water (having compared the ease and comfort for himself),
which people would he suppose to be the eminently practical
one, I wonder!
Why, on the other hand, do we adopt, as a mere matter of
lazy usage, charges against ourselves, that have as little
foundation as some of our boasts? We are eminently a
money-loving people. Are we? Well, we are bad enough;
but, I have heard Money more talked of in a week under the
stars and stripes, than in a year under the union-jack. In
a two hours' walk in Paris, any day, you shall overhear more
scraps of conversation that turn upon Money, Money, Money,
Money, than in a whole day's saunter between Temple Bar
and the Royal Exchange. I go into the Theatre Fran9ais,
after the rising of the curtain ; fifty to one the first words I
hear from the stage as I settle myself in my seat, are fifty
thousand francs; she has a dowry of fifty thousand francs;
he has an income of fifty thousand francs ; I will bet you fifty
thousand francs upon it, my dear Emile; I come from win-
ning at the Bourse, my celestial Diane, fifty thousand francs.
I pass into the Boulevard theatres one by one. At the Vari-
etes, I find an old lady who must be conciliated by two oppos-
ing nephews, because she has fifty thousand francs per annum.
At the Gymnase, I find the English Prime Minister (attended
WHY? 109
by his faithful servant Tom Bob), in a fearful predicament
occasioned by injudicious speculation in millions of francs.
At the Porte St. Martin, I find a picturesque person with a
murder on his mind, into which he has been betrayed by a
pressing necessity for a box containing fifty thousand francs.
At the Ambigu, I find everybody poisoning everybody else for
fifty thousand francs. At the Lyrique, I find on the stage a
portly old gentleman, a slender young gentleman, and a
piquante little woman with sprightly eyebrows, all singing
an extremely short song together about fifty thousand francs
Lira lara, fifty thousand francs Ting ting ! At the Imperial,
I find a general with his arm in a bandage, sitting in a mag-
nificent summer-house, relating his autobiography to his
niece, and arriving at this point: 'It is to this ravishing
spot then, my dearest Julie, that I, thy uncle, faithful always
to his Emperor, then retired; bringing with me my adorable
Georgette, this wounded arm, this cross of glory, the love of
France, remembrances ever inextinguishable of the Emperor
my master, and fifty thousand francs.' At this establishment
the sum begins to diminish, and goes on rapidly decreasing
until I finish at the Funambules and find Pierrot despoiling
a friend of only one hundred francs, to the great satisfaction
of the congregated blouses. Again. Will any Englishman
undertake to match me that generic French old lady whom I
will instantly produce against him, from the private life of
any house of five floors in the French capital, and who is a
mere gulf for swallowing my money, or any man's money?
That generic French old lady who, whether she gives me her
daughter to wife, or sits next me in a balcony at a theatre, or
opposite to me in a public carriage, or lets me an apartment,
or plays me a match at dominoes, or sells me an umbrella,
equally absorbs my substance, calculates my resources with
a fierce nicety, and is intent upon my ruin? That generic
French old lady who is always in black, and always pro-
tuberant, and always complimentary, and who always eats up
everything that is presented to her — almost eats her knife
besides — and who has a supernatural craving after francs
which fascinates me, and inclines me to pour out all I have
at her feet, saying, 'Take them and twinkle at me with those
110 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
hungry eyes no more?' We eminently a money-loving people !
Why do we talk such nonsense with this terrible old woman
to contradict us?
Why do we take conclusions into our heads for which we
have no warrant, and bolt with them like mad horses, until we
are brought up by stone walls? Why do we go cheering and
shouting after an officer who didn't run away — as though all
the rest of our brave officers did run away ! — and why do we
go plucking hairs out of the tail of the identical charger, and
why do we follow up the identical uniform, and why do we
stupidly roar ourselves hoarse with acclamation about noth-
ing? Why don't we stop to think? Why don't we say to
one another, 'What have the identical charger and the identi-
cal uniform done for us, and what have they done against
us : let us look at the account.' How much better this would
be than straining our throats first, and afterwards discover-
ing that there was less than no reason for the same !
Why am I, at any given moment, in tears of triumph and
joy, because Buffy and Boodle are at the head of public
affairs? I freely declare that I have not the least idea what
specific action Buffy and Boodle have ever in the whole course
of their existence done, that has been of any appreciable ad-
vantage to my beloved country. On the other hand, I no
less freely acknowledge that I have seen Buffy and Boodle
(with some small appearance of trading in principles), nail
their colours to every mast in the political fleet. Yet I
swear to everybody — because everybody swears to me — that
Buffy and Boodle are the only men for the crisis, and that
none of women born, but Buffy and Boodle, could pull us
through it. I would quarrel with my son for Buffy and
Boodle. I almost believe that in one of my states of excite-
ment I would die for Buffy and Boodle. I expect to be
presently subscribing for statues to Buffy and Boodle. Now,
I am curious to know why I go on in this way? I am pro-
foundly in earnest; but I want to know Why?
I wonder why I feel a glow of complacency in a court of
justice, when I hear the learned judges taking uncommon
pains to prevent the prisoner from letting out the truth. If
the object of the trial be to discover the truth, perhaps it
WHY? Ill
might be as edifying to hear it, even from the prisoner, as to
hear what is unquestionably not the truth from the prisoner's
advocate. I wonder why I say, in a flushed and rapturous
manner, that it would be 'un-English' to examine the prisoner.
I suppose that with common fairness it would be next to
impossible -to confuse him, unless he lied; and if he did lie, I
suppose he could hardly be brought to confusion too soon.
Why does that word 'un-English,' always act as a spell upon
me, and why do I suffer it to settle any question? Twelve
months ago, it was un-English to abstain from throttling
our soldiers. Thirty years ago, it was un-English not to
hang people up by scores every Monday. Sixty years ago, it
was un-English to be sober after dinner. A hundred years
ago, it was un-English not to love cock-fighting, prize-fight-
ing, dog-fighting, bull-baiting, and other savageries. Why
do I submit to the word as a clincher, without asking myself
whether it has any meaning? I don't dispute that I do so,
every day of my life; but I want to know why I do so?
On the other hand, why am I meek in regard of really non-
English sentiments, if the potent bugbear of that term be
not called into play? Here is a magistrate tells me I am
one of a nation of drunkards. All Englishmen are drunk-
ards, is the judicial bray. Here is another magistrate pro-
pounding from the seat of justice the stupendous nonsense
that it is desirable that every person who gives alms in the
streets should be fined for that offence. This to a Christian
people, and with the New Testament lying before him — as
a sort of Dummy, I suppose, to swear witnesses on. Why
does my so-easily-frightened nationality not take offence at
such things? My hobby shies at shadows; why does it amble
so quietly past these advertising-vans of Blockheads seeking
notoriety?
Why? I might as well ask, Why I leave off here, when I
have a long perspective of Why stretching out before me.
112 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
RAILWAY DREAMING
[MAY 10, 1856]
WHEN was I last in France all the winter, deducting the
many hours I passed upon the wet and windy way between
Prance and England? In what autumn and spring was it
that those Champs Elysees trees were yellow and scant of
leaf when I first looked at them out of my balcony, and were
a bright and tender green when I last looked at them on a
beautiful May morning?
I can't make out. I am never sure of time or place upon
a Railroad. I can't read, I can't think, I can't sleep — I can
only dream. Rattling along in this railway carriage in a
state of luxurious confusion, I take it for granted I am com-
ing from somewhere, and going somewhere else. I seek to
know no more. Why things come into my head and fly out
again, whence they come and why they come, where they go
and why they go, I am incapable of considering. It may be
the guard's business, or the railway company's; I only know
it is not mine. I know nothing about myself — for anything
I know, I may be coming from the Moon.
If I am coming from the Moon, what an extraordinary
people the Mooninians must be for sitting down in the open
air! I have seen them wipe the hoar-frost off the seats in
the public ways, on the faintest appearance of a gleam of
sun, and sit down to enjoy themselves. I have seen them,
two minutes after it has left off raining for the first time in
eight-and-forty hours, take chairs in the midst of the mud
and water, and begin to chat. I have seen them by the road-
side, easily reclining on iron couches, when their beards have
been all but blown off their chins by the east wind. I have
seen them, with no protection from the black drizzle and dirt
but a saturated canvas blind overhead, and a handful of sand
underfoot, smoke and drink new beer, whole evenings. And
the Mooninian babies. Heavens, what a surprising race are
RAILWAY DREAMING 113
the Mooninian babies ! Seventy-one of these innocents have
I counted, with their nurses and chairs, spending the day out-
side the Cafe de la Lime, in weather that would have satisfied
Herod. Thirty-nine have I beheld in that locality at once,
with these eyes, partaking of their natural refreshment under
umbrellas. Twenty-three have I seen engaged with skipping-
ropes, in mire three inches thick. At three years old the
Mooninian babies grow up. They are by that time familiar
with coffee-houses, and used up as to truffles. They dine at
six. Soup, fish, two entrees, a vegetable, a cold dish, or pate-
de-foie-gras, a roast a salad, a sweet, and a preserved peach
or so, form (with occasional whets of sardines, radishes, and
Lyons sausage) their frugal repast. They breakfast at
eleven, on a light beefsteak with Madeira sauce, a kidney
steeped in champagne, a trifle of sweetbread, a plate of fried
potatoes, and a glass or two of wholesome Bordeaux wine. I
have seen a marriageable young female aged five, in a mature
bonnet and crinoline, finish off at a public establishment with
her amiable parents, on coffee that would consign a child of
any other nation to the family undertaker in one experiment.
I have dined at a friendly party, sitting next to a Mooninian
baby, who ate of nine dishes besides ice and fruit, and, wildly
stimulated by sauces, in all leisure moments flourished its
spoon about its head in the manner of a pictorial glory.
The Mooninian Exchange was a strange sight in my time.
The Moonians of all ranks and classes were gambling at that
period (whenever it was), in the wildest manner — in a man-
ner, which, in its extension to all possible subjects of gam-
bling, and in the prevalence of the frenzy among all grades,
has few parallels that I can recall. The steps of the Moon-
inian Bourse were thronged every day with a vast, hot, mad
crowd, so expressive of the desperate game in which the whole
City were players, that one stood aghast. In the Mooninian
Journals I read, any day, without surprise, how such a Porter
had rushed out of such a house and flung himself into the
river, 'because of losses on the Bourse' ; or how such a man
had robbed such another, with the intent of acquiring funds
for speculation on the Bourse. In the great Mooninian Pub-
114 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
lie Drive, every day, there were crowds of riders on blood-
horses, and crowds of riders in dainty carriages red-velvet
lined and white-leather harnessed, all of whom had the cards
and counters in their pockets ; who were all feeding the blood-
horses on paper and stabling them on the board ; who were
leading a grand life at a great rate and with a mighty show ;
who were all profuse and prosperous while the cards could con-
tinue to be shuffled and the deals to go round.
In the same place, I saw, nearly every day, a curious spec-
tacle. One pretty little child at a window, always waving
his hand at, and cheering, an array of open carriages escorted
by out-riders in green and gold; and no one echoing the
child's acclamation. Occasional deference in carriages, oc-
casional curiosity on foot, occasional adulation from for-
eigners, I noticed in that connection, in that place; but, four
great streams of determined indifference I always saw flowing
up and down ; and I never, in six months, knew a hand or
heard a voice to come in real aid of the child.
I am not a lonely man, though I was once a lonely boy ;
but that was long ago. The Mooninian capital, however, is
the place for lonely men to dwell in. I have tried it, and
have condemned myself to solitary freedom expressly for the
purpose. I sometimes like to pretend to be childless and
companionless, and to wonder whether, if I were really so, I
should be glad to find somebody to ask me out to dinner, in-
stead of living under a constant terror of weakly making
engagements that I don't want to make. Hence, I have been
into many Mooninian restaurants as a lonely man. The com-
pany have regarded me as an unfortunate person of that de-
scription. The paternal character, occupying the next table
with two little boys whose legs were difficult of administration
in a narrow space, as never being the right legs in the right
places, has regarded me, at first, with looks of envy. When
the little boys have indecorously inflated themselves out of
the seltzer-water bottle, I have seen discomfiture and social
shame on that Mooninian's brow. Meanwhile I have sat ma-
jestically using my tooth-pick, in silent assertion of my coun-
terfeit superiority. And yet it has been good to see how that
family Mooninian has vanquished me in the long-run. I
RAILWAY DREAMING 115
have never got so red in the face over my meat and wine, as
he. I have never warmed up into such enjoyment of my meal
as he has of his. I have never forgotten the legs of the little
boys, whereas from that Mooninian's soul they have quickly
walked into oblivion. And when, at last, under the ripening
influence of dinner, those boys have both together pulled at
that Mooninian's waistcoat (imploring him, as I conceived, to
take them to the play-house, next door but one), I have
shrunk under the glance he has given me; so emphatically
has it said, with the virtuous farmer in the English domestic
comedy, 'Dang it, Squoire, can'ee doa thic!' (I may explain
in a parenthesis that 'thic,' which the virtuous farmer can
do and the squire can't, is to lay his hand upon his heart — a
result opposed to my experience in actual life, where the hum-
bugs are always able to lay their hands upon their hearts, and
do it far oftener and much better than the virtuous men.)
In my solitary character I have walked forth after eating
my dinner and paying my bill — in the Mooninian capital we
used to call the bill 'the addition' — to take my coffee and
cigar at some separate establishment devoted to such enjoy-
ments. And in the customs belonging to these, as in many
other easy and gracious customs, the Mooninians are highly
deserving of imitation among ourselves. I have never had
far to go, unless I have been particularly hard to please; a
dozen houses at the utmost. A spring evening is in my
mind when I sauntered from my dinner into one of these re-
sorts, haphazard. The thoroughfare in which it stood, was
not as wide as the Strand in London, by Somerset House ; the
houses were no larger and no better than are to be found in
that place; the climate (we find ours a convenient scapegoat)
had been, for months, quite as cold and wet, and very very
often almost as dark, as the climate in the Strand. The place
into which I turned, had been there all the winter just as it
was then. It was like a Strand-shop, with the front alto-
gether taken away. Within, it was sanded, prettily painted
and papered, decorated with mirrors and glass chandeliers
for gas ; furnished with little round stone tables, crimson
stools, and crimson benches. It was made much more tasteful
(at the cost of three and fourpence a week) by two elegant
116 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
baskets of flowers on pedestals. An inner raised-floor, an-
swering to the back shop in the Strand, was partitioned off
with glass, for those who might prefer to read the papers and
play at dominoes, in an atmosphere free from tobacco-smoke.
There, in her neat little tribune, sits the Lady of the Counter,
surrounded at her needlework by lump-sugar and little punch-
bowls. To whom I touch my hat ; she graciously acknowl-
edging the salute. Forth from her side comes a pleasant
waiter, scrupulously clean, brisk, attentive, honest: a man to
be very obliging to me, but expecting me to be obliging in
return, and whom I cannot bully — which is no deprivation to
me, as I don't at all want to do it. He brings me, at my re-
quest, my cup of coffee and cigar, and, of his own motion, a
small decanter of brandy and a liqueur-glass. He gives me a
light, and leaves me to my enjoyment. The place from which
the shop-front has been taken makes a gay proscenium ; as I
sit and smoke, the street becomes a stage, with an endless pro-
cession of lively actors crossing and re-crossing. Women
with children, carts and coaches, men on horseback, soldiers,
water-carriers with their pails, family groups, more soldiers,
lounging exquisites, more family groups (coming past,
flushed, a little too late for the play), stone-masons leaving
work on the new buildings and playing tricks with one an-
other as they go along, two lovers, more soldiers, wonderfully
neat young women from shops, carrying flat boxes to cus-
tomers ; a seller of cool drink, with the drink in a crimson
velvet temple at his back, and a waistcoat of tumblers on ;
boys, dogs, more soldiers, horse-riders strolling to the Circus
in amazing shirts of private life, and yellow kid gloves ; fam-
ily groups ; pickers-up of refuse, with baskets at their backs
and hooked rods in their hands to fill them with; more neat
young women, more soldiers. The gas begins to spring up
in the street ; and my brisk waiter lighting our gas, enshrines
me, like an idol, in a sparkling temple. A family group come
in: father and mother and little child. Two short-throated
old ladies come in, who will pocket their spare sugar, and out
of whom I foresee that the establishment will get as little profit
as possible. Workman in his common frock comes in ; orders
his small bottle of beer, and lights his pipe. We are all
RAILWAY DREAMING 117
amused, sitting seeing the traffic in the street, and the traffic
in the street is in its turn amused by seeing us. It is surely
better for me, and for the family group, and for the two old
ladies, and for the workman, to have thus much of com-
munity with the city life of all degrees, than to be getting
bilious in hideous black-holes, and turning cross and suspicious
in solitary places ! I may never say a word to any of these
people in my life, nor they to me ; but, we are all interchang-
ing enjoyment frankly and openly — not fencing ourselves
off and boxing ourselves up. We are forming a habit of mu-
tual consideration and allowance; and this institution of the
cafe (for all my entertainment and pleasure in which, I pay
tenpence), is a part of the civilised system that requires the
giant to fall into his own place in a crowd, and will not allow
him to take the dwarf's; and which renders the commonest
person as certain of retaining his or her commonest seat in any
public assembly, as the marquis is of holding his stall at the
Opera through the evening.
There were many things among the Mooninians that might
be changed for the better, and there were many things that
they might learn from us. They could teach us, for all that,
how to make and keep a Park — which we have been accus-
tomed to think ourselves rather learned in — and how to trim
up our ornamental streets, a dozen times a-day, with scrub-
bing-brushes, and sponges, and soap, and chloride of lime.
As to the question of sweetness within doors, I would rather
not have put my own residence, even under the perpetual in-
fluence of peat charcoal, in competition with the cheapest
model lodging-house in England. And one strange sight,
which I have contemplated many a time during the last dozen
years, I think is not so well arranged in the Mooninian capi-
tal as in London, even though our coroners hold their dread
courts at the little public-houses — a custom which I am
of course prepared to hear is, and which I know before-
hand must be, one of the Bulwarks of the British Constitu-
tion.
I am thinking of the Mooninian Morgue, where the bodies
of all persons discovered dead, with no clue to their identity
upon them, are placed to be seen by all who choose to go and
118 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
look at them. All the world knows this custom, and perhaps
all the world knows that the bodies lie on inclined planes
within a great glass window, as though Holbein should rep-
resent Death, in his grim Dance, keeping a shop, and display-
ing his goods like a Regent Street or Boulevard linen-draper.
But, all the world may not have had the means of remark-
ing perhaps, as I by chance have had from time to time, some
of the accidental peculiarities of the place. The keeper
seems to be fond of birds. In fair weather, there is always a
cage outside his little window, and a something singing within
it as such a something sang, thousands of ages ago, before
ever a man died on this earth. The spot is sunny in the
forenoon, and, there being a little open space there, and a
market for fruit and vegetables close at hand, and a way to
the Great Cathedral past the door, is a reasonably good spot
for mountebanks. Accordingly, I have often found Paillasse
there, balancing a knife or a straw upon his nose, with such
intentness that he has almost backed himself in at the door-
way. The learned owls have elicited great mirth there, within
my hearing, and once the performing dog who had a wait in
his part, came and peeped in, with a red jacket on, while I
was alone in the contemplation of five bodies, one with a bul-
let through the temple. It happened, on another occasion,
that a handsome youth lay in front in the centre of the win-
dow, and that a press of people behind me rendered it a dif-
ficult and slow process to get out. As I gave place to the
man at my right shoulder, he slipped into the position I had
occupied, with his attention so concentrated on the dead fig-
ure that he seemed unaware of the change of place. I never
saw a plainer expression that that upon his features, or one
that struck more enduringly into my remembrance. He was
an evil-looking fellow of two or three and twenty, and had
his left hand at the draggled ends of his cravat, which he
had put to his mouth, and his right hand feeling in his breast.
His head was a little on one side ; his eyes were intently fixed
upon the figure. 'Now, if I were to give that pretty young
fellow, my rival, a stroke with a hatchet on the back of the
head, or were to tumble him over into the river by night, he
would look pretty much like that, I am thinking !' He could
RAILWAY DREAMING 119
not have said it more plainly ; — I have always an idea that he
went away and did it.
It is wonderful to see the people at this place. Cheery
married women, basket in hand, strolling in, on their way to
or from the buying of the day's dinner; children in arms
with little pointing fingers ; young girls ; prowling boys ; com-
rades in working, soldiering, or what not. Ninety-nine times
in a hundred, nobody about to cross the threshold, looking
in the faces coming out, could form the least idea, from any-
thing in their expression, of the nature of the sight. I have
studied them attentively, and have reason for saying so.
But, I never derived so strange a sensation from this dis-
mal establishment as on going in there once, and finding the
keeper moving about among the bodies. I never saw any
living creature in among them, before or since, and the won-
der was that he looked so much more ghastly and intolerable
than the dead, stark people. There is a strong light from
above, and a general cold, clammy aspect; and I think that
with the first start of seeing him must have come the impres-
sion that the bodies were all getting up ! It was instan-
taneous ; but he looked horribly incongruous there, even after
it had departed. All about him was a library of mysterious
books that I have often had my eyes on. From pegs and
hooks and rods, hang, for a certain time, the clothes of the
dead who have been buried without recognition. They
mostly have been taken off people who were found in the
water, and arc swollen (as the people often are) out of shape
and likeness. Such awful boots, with turned-up toes, and
sand and gravel clinging to them, shall be seen in no other
collection of dress ; nor, such neckcloths, long and lank, still
retaining the form of having been wrung out; nor, such
slimy garments with puffed legs and arms ; nor such hats and
caps that have been battered against pile and bridge; nor,
such dreadful rags. Whose work ornaments that decent
blouse; who sewed that shirt? And the man who wore it.
Did he ever stand at this window wondering, as I do, what
sleepers shall be brought to these beds, and whether wonder-
ers as to who should occupy them, have come to be laid down
here themselves?
120 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
London ! Please to get your tickets ready, gentleme^
I must have a coach. And that reminds me, how much bet-
ter they manage coaches for the public in the capital of the
Mooninians ! But, it is done by Centralisation ! somebody
shrieks to me from some vestry's topmost height. Then, my
good sir, let us have Centralisation. It is a long word, but
I am not at all afraid of long words when they represent effi-
cient things. Circumlocution is a long word, but it repre-
sents inefficiency ; inefficiency in everything ; inefficiency from
the state coach to my hackney cab.
THE DEMEANOUR OF MURDERERS
[JUNE 14, 1856]
THE recent trial of the greatest villain1 that ever stood in
the Old Bailey dock, has produced the usual descriptions in-
separable from such occasions. The public has read from
day to day of the murderer's complete self-possession, of his
constant coolness, of his profound composure, of his perfect
equanimity. Some describers have gone so far as to repre-
sent him, occasionally rather amused than otherwise by the
proceedings; and all the accounts that we have seen, concur
in more or less suggesting that there is something admirable,
and difficult to reconcile with guilt, in the bearing so elab-
orately set forth.
As whatever tends, however undesignedly, to insinuate this
uneasy sense of incongruity into any mind, and to invest so
abhorrent a ruffian with the slightest tinge of heroism, must
be prejudicial to the general welfare, we revive the detestable
subject with the hope of showing that there is nothing at all
singular in such a deportment, but that it is always to be
looked for and counted on, in the case of a very wicked mur-
derer. The blacker the guilt, the stronger the probability
of its being thus carried off.
In passing, we will express an opinion that Nature never
i William Palmer.
121
writes a bad hand. Her writing, as it may be read in the
human countenance, is invariably legible, if we come at all
trained to the reading of it. Some little weighing and com-
paring are necessary. It is not enough in turning our eyes
on the demon in the Dock, to say he has a fresh colour, or a
high head, or a bluff manner, or what not, and therefore he
does not look like a murderer, and we are surprised and
shaken. The physiognomy and conformation of the Poisoner
whose trial occasions these remarks, were exactly in accord-
ance with his deeds; and every guilty consciousness he had
gone on storing up in his mind, had set its mark upon him.
We proceed, within as short a compass as possible, to il-
lustrate the position we have placed before our readers in the
first paragraph of this paper.
The Poisoner's demeanour was considered exceedingly re-
markable, because of his composure under trial, and because
of the confident expectation of acquittal which he professed
to the last, and under the influence of which he, at various
times during his incarceration, referred to the plans he en-
tertained for the future when he should be free again.
Can any one, reflecting on the matter for five minutes, sup-
pose it possible — we do not say probable, but possible — that
in the breast of this Poisoner there were surviving, in the
days of his trial, any lingering traces of sensibility, or any
wrecked fragment of the quality which we call sentiment?
Can the profoundest or the simplest man alive, believe that in
such a heart there could have been left, by that time, any
touch of Pity? An objection to die, and a special objection
to be killed, no doubt he had; and with that objection very
strong within him for divers very weighty reasons, he was —
not quite composed. Distinctly not quite composed, but, on
the contrary, very restless. At one time, he was incessantly
pulling on and pulling off his glove ; at another time, his hand
was constantly passing over and over his face; and the thing
most instanced in proof of his composure, the perpetual writ-
ing and scattering about of little notes, which, as the verdict
drew nearer and nearer, thickened from a sprinkling to a
heavy shower, is in itself a proof of miserable restlessness.
Beyond this emotion, which any lower animal would have,
122 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
with an apprehension on it of a similar fate, what was to be
expected from such a creature but insensibility? I poison
my friend in his drink, and I poison my friend in his bed, and
I poison my wife, and I poison her memory, and do you look
to ME, at the end of such a career as mine, for sensibility?
I have not the power of it even in my own behalf, I have lost
the manner of it, I don't know what it means, I stand con-
temptuously wondering at you people here when I see you
moved by this affair. In the Devil's name, man, have you
heard the evidence of that chambermaid, whose tea I should
like to have the sweetening of? Did you hear her describe
the agonies in which my friend expired? Do you know that
it was my trade to be learned in poisons, and that I foresaw
all that, and considered all that, and knew, when I stood at
his bedside looking down upon his face turned to me for help
on its road to the grave through the frightful gate when
swinging on its hinges, that in so many hours or minutes all
those horrors would infallibly ensue? Have you heard that,
after my poisonings, I have had to face the circumstances
out, with friends and enemies, doctors, undertakers, all sorts
of men, and have uniformly done it ; and do you wonder that
I face it out with you? Why not? What right or reason
can you have to expect anything else of me ? Wonder ! You
might wonder, indeed, if you saw me moved here now before
you. If I had any natural human feeling for my face to ex-
press, do you imagine that those medicines of my prescribing
and administering would ever have been taken from my hand?
Why, man, my demeanour at this bar is the natural com-
panion of my crimes, and, if it were a tittle different from
what it is, you might even begin reasonably to doubt whether
I had ever committed them!
The Poisoner had a confident expectation of acquittal.
We doubt as little that he really had some considerable hope
of it, as we do that he made a pretence of having more than
he really had. Let us consider, first, if it be wonderful that
he should have been rather sanguine. He had poisoned his
victims according to his carefully laid plans ; he had got them
buried out of his way ; he had murdered, and forged, and yet
kept his place as a good fellow and a sporting character ; he
DEMEANOUR OF MURDERERS 123
had made a capital friend of the coroner, and a serviceable
traitor of the postmaster; he was a great public character,
with a special Act of Parliament for his trial; the choice
spirits of the Stock Exchange were offering long odds in his
favour, and, to wind up all, here was a tip-top Counsellor
bursting into tears for him, saying to the jury, three times
over, 'You dare not, you dare not, you dare not !' and bolting
clean out of the course to declare his belief that he was in-
nocent. With all this to encourage him, with his own Derby-
day division of mankind into knaves and fools, and with his
own secret knowledge of the difficulties and mysteries with
which the proof of Poison had been, in the manner of the
Poisoning, surrounded, it would have been strange indeed if
he were not borne up by some idea of escape. But, why
should he have professed himself to have more hope of escape
than he really entertained? The answer is, because it be-
longs to that extremity, that the villain in it should not only
declare a strong expectation of acquittal himself, but should
try to infect all the people about him with it. Besides hav-
ing an artful fancy (not wholly without foundation) that he
disseminates by that means an impression that he is innocent ;
to surround himself in his narrowed world with this fiction is,
for the time being, to fill the jail with a faintly rose-col-
oured atmosphere, and to remove the gallows to a more agree-
able distance. Hence, plans are laid for the future, com-
municated with an engaging candour to turnkeys, and dis-
cussed in a reliant spirit. Even sick men and women, over
whom natural death is impending, constantly talk with those
about them on precisely the same principle.
It may be objected that there is some slight ingenuity in
our endeavours to resolve the demeanour of this Poisoner into
the same features as the demeanour of every other wicked
and very hardened criminal in the same strait, but that a
parallel would be better than argument. We have no diffi-
culty in finding a parallel; we have no difficulty in finding
scores, beyond the almost insuperable difficulty of finding, in
the criminal records, as deeply-dyed a murderer. To em-
barrass these remarks, however, with references to cases that
have passed out of the general memory, or have never been
124 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
widely known, would be to render the discussion very irk-
some. We will confine ourselves to a famous instance. We
will not even ask if it be so long ago since Rush was tried,
that his demeanour is forgotten. We will call Thurtell into
court, as one of the murderers best remembered in England.
With the difference that the circumstances of Thurtell's
guilt are not comparable in atrocity with those of the Pois-
oner's, there are points of strong resemblance between the
two men. Each was born in a fair station, and educated in
conformity with it ; each murdered a man with whom he had
been on terms of intimate association, and for whom he pro-
fessed a friendship at the time of the murder; both were
members of that vermin-race of outer betters and blacklegs,
of whom some worthy samples were presented on both trials,
and of whom, as a community, mankind would be blessedly
rid, if they could all be, once and for ever, knocked on the
head at a blow. Thurtell's demeanour was exactly that of
the Poisoner's. We have referred to the newspapers of his
time, in aid of our previous knowledge of the case ; and they
present a complete confirmation of the simple fact for which
we contend. From day to day, during his imprisonment be-
fore his trial, he is described as 'collected and resolute in his
demeanour,' as 'rather mild and conciliatory in his address,' as
being visited by 'friends whom he receives with cheerfulness,'
as 'remaining firm and unmoved,' as 'increasing in confidence
as the day which is to decide his fate draws nigh,' as 'speak-
ing of the favourable result of the trial with his usual confi-
dence.' On his trial, he looks 'particularly well and healthy.'
His attention and composure are considered as won-
derful as the Poisoner's ; he writes notes as the Poisoner did ;
he watches the case with the same cool eye ; he 'retains that
firmness for which, from the moment of his apprehension, he
has been distinguished' ; he 'carefully assorts his papers on a
desk near him'; he is (in this being singular) his own orator,
and makes a speech in the manner of Edmund Kean, on the
whole not very unlike that of the leading counsel for the
Poisoner, concluding, as to his own innocence, with a So help
m« God! Before his trial, the Poisoner says he will be at
the coming race for the Derby. Before his trial. Thurtell
DEMEANOUR OF MURDERERS 125
says, 'that after his acquittal he will visit his father, and will
propose, to him to advance the portion which he intended for
him, upon which he will reside abroad.' (So Mr. Manning
observed, under similar circumstances, that when all that non-
sense was over, and the thing wound up, he had an idea of es-
tablishing himself in the West Indies. ) When the Poisoner's
trial is yet to last another day or so, he enjoys his half-
pound of steak and his tea, wishes his best friends may sleep
as he does, and fears the grave 'no more than his bed.' (See
the Evening Hymn for a Young Child.) When Thurtell's
trial is yet to last another day or so, he takes his cold meat,
tea, and coffee, and 'enjoys himself with great comfort' ; also,
on the morning of his execution, he wakes from as innocent
a slumber as the Poisoner's, declaring that he has had an
excellent night, and that he hasn't dreamed 'about this busi-
ness.' Whether the parallel will hold to the last, as to 'feeling
very well and very comfortable,' as to 'the firm step and per-
fect calmness,' as to 'the manliness and correctness of his
general conduct, as to 'the countenance unchanged by the
awfulness of the situation' — not to say as to bowing to a
friened, from the scaffold 'in a friendly but dignified man-
ner5— our readers will know for themselves when we know
too.
It is surely time that people who are not in the habit of
dissecting such appearances, but who are in the habit of
reading about them, should be helped to the knowledge that,
in the worst examples they are the most to be expected, and
the least to be wondered at. That, there is no inconsistency
in them, and no fortitude in them. That, there is nothing in
them but cruelty and insensibility. That, they are seen, be-
cause the man is of a piece with his misdeeds; and that it is
not likely that he ever could have committed the crimes for
which he is to suffer, if he had not this demeanour to present,
in standing publicly to answer for them.
126 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
NOBODY, SOMEBODY, AND EVERYBODY
[AUGUST 30, 1856]
THE power of Nobody is becoming so enormous in England,
and he alone is responsible for so many proceedings, both in
the way of commission and omission ; he has so much to an-
swer for, and is so constantly called to account; that a few
remarks upon him may not be ill-timed.
The hand which this surprising person had in the late war
is amazing to consider. It was he who left the tents behind,
who left the baggage behind, who chose the worst possible
ground for encampments, who provided no means of trans-
port, who killed the horses, who paralysed the commissariat,
who knew nothing of the business he professed to know and
monopolised, who decimated the English army. It was No-
body who gave out the famous unroasted coffee, it was Nobody
who made the hospitals more horrible than language can de-
scribe, it was Nobody who occasioned all the dire confusion of
Balaklava harbour, it was even Nobody who ordered the fatal
Balaklava cavalry charge. The non-relief of Kars was the
work of Nobody, and Nobody has justly and severely suffered
for that infamous transaction.
It is difficult for the mind to span the career of Nobody.
The sphere of action opened to this wonderful person, so
enlarges every day, that the limited faculties of Anybody are
too weak to compass it. Yet, the nature of the last tribunal
expressly appointed for the detection and punishment of No-
body may, as a part of his stupendous history, be glanced at
without winking.
At the Old Bailey, when a person under strong suspicion
of malpractices is tried, it is the custom (the rather as the
strong suspicion has been found, by a previous enquiry, to
exist), to conduct the trial on stringent principles, and to con-
fide it to impartial hands. It has not yet become the prac-
tice of the criminal, or even of the civil courts — but they,
indeed, are constituted for the punishment of Somebody —
to invite the prisoner's or defendant's friends to talk the
NOBODY, SOMEBODY, EVERYBODY 127
matter over with him in a cosy, tea-and-muffin sort of way,
and make out a verdict together, that shall be what a de-
posed iron king called making things 'pleasant.' But, when
Nobody was shown within these few weeks to have occasioned
intolerable misery and loss in the late war, and to have in-
curred a vast amount of guilt in bringing to pass results
which all morally sane persons can understand to be fraught
with fatal consequences, far beyond present calculation, this
cosy course of proceeding was the course pursued. My
Lord, intent upon establishing the responsibility of Nobody,
walked into court as he would walk into a ball-room ; and My
Lord's friends and admirers toadied and fawned upon him in
court, as they would toady him and fawn upon him in the
other assembly. My Lord carried his head very high, and
took a mighty great tone with the common people ; and there
was no question as to anything My Lord did or said, and
Nobody got triumphantly fixed. Ignorance enough and in-
competency enough to bring any country that the world has
ever seen to defeat and shame, and to lay any head that ever
was in it low, were proved beyond question ; but, My Lord
cried, 'On Nobody's eyes be it!' and My Lord's impaneled
chorus cried, 'There is no impostor but Nobody ; on him be
the shame and blame !'
Surely, this is a rather wonderful state of things to be
realising itself so long after the Flood, in such a country as
England. Surely, it suggests to us with some force, that
wherever this ubiquitous Nobody is, there mischief is and
there danger is. For, it is especially to be borne in mind that
wherever failure is accomplished, there Nobody lurks. With
success, he has nothing to do. That is Everybody's busi-
ness, and all manner of improbable people will invariably
be found at the bottom of it. But, it is the great feature
of the present epoch that all public disaster in the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is assuredly, and to
dead certainty, Nobody's work.
We have, it is not to be denied, punished Nobody, with
exemplary rigour. We have, as a nation, allowed ourselves
to be deluded by no influences or insolences of office or rank,
but have dealt with Nobody in a spirit of equal and uncom-
128 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
promising justice that has moved the admiration of the world.
I have had some opportunities of remarking, out of Eng-
land, the impression made on other peoples by the stern
Saxon spirit with which the default proved and the wrong
done, we have tracked down and punished the defaulter and
wrong-doer. And I do here declare my solemn belief,
founded on much I have seen, that the remembrance of our
frightful failures within the last three years, and of our re-
taliation upon Nobody, will be more vivid and potent in Eu-
rope (mayhap in Asia, too, and in America) for years upon
years to come than all our successes since the days of the
Spanish Armada.
In civil matters we have Nobody equally active. When
a civil office breaks down, the break-down is sure to be in
Nobody's department. I entreat on my reader, dubious of
this proposition, to wait until the next break-down (the
reader is certain not to have to wait long), and to observe,
whether or no, it is in Nobody's department. A dispatch of
the greatest moment is sent to a minister abroad, at a most
important crisis; Nobody reads it. British subjects are af-
fronted in a foreign territory ; Nobody interferes. Our own
loyal fellow-subjects, a few thousand miles away, want to ex-
change political, commercial, and domestic intelligence with
us; Nobody stops the mail. The government, with all its
mighty means and appliances, is invariably beaten and out-
stripped by private enterprise; which we all know to be
Nobody's fault. Something will be the national death of us,
some day ; and who can doubt that Nobody will be brought in
Guilty?
Now, might it not be well, if it were only for the nov-
elty of the experiment, to try Somebody a little? Reserving
Nobody for statues, and stars and garters, and batons, and
places and pensions without duties, what if we were to try
Somebody for real work? More than that, what if we were
to punish Somebody with a most inflexible and grim severity,
when we caught him pompously undertaking in holiday-time
to do work, and found him, when the working-time came,
altogether unable to do it?
Where do I, as an Englishman, want Somebody? Be-
NOBODY, SOMEBODY, EVERYBODY 129
fore high Heaven, I want him everywhere ! I look round the
whole dull horizon, and I want Somebody to do work while
the Brazen Head, already hoarse with crying 'Time is !' passes
into the second warning, 'Time was!' I don't want Some-
body to let off Parliamentary penny crackers against evils
that need to be stormed by the thunderbolts of Jove. I don't
want Somebody to sustain, for Parliamentary and Club en-
tertainment, and by the desire of several persons of distinc-
tion, the character of a light old gentleman, or a fast old
gentleman, or a debating old gentleman, or a dandy old gen-
tleman, or a free-and-easy old gentleman, or a capital old
gentleman considering his years. I want Somebody to be
clever in doing the business, not clever in evading it. The
more clever he is in the latter quality (which has been the
making of Nobody), the worse I hold it to be for me and
my children and for all men and their children. I want
Somebody who shall be no fiction ; but a capable, good, de-
termined workman. For, it seems to me that from the mo-
ment when I accept Anybody in a high place, whose function
in that place is to exchange winks with me instead of doing
the serious deeds that belong to it, I set afloat a system of
false pretence and general swindling, the taint of which soon
begins to manifest itself in every department of life, from
Newgate to the Court of Bankruptcy, and thence to the
highest Court of Appeal. For this reason, above all others,
I want to see the working Somebody in every responsible po-
sition which the winking Somebody and Nobody now monop-
olise between them.
And this brings me back to Nobody; to the great irre-
sponsible, guilty, wicked, blind giant of this time. O friends,
countrymen, and lovers, look at that carcase smelling strong
of prussic acid, (drunk out of a silver milkpot, which was a
part of the plunder, or as the less pernicious thieves call it,
the swag), cumbering Hampstead Heath by London town!
Think of the history of which that abomination is at once the
beginning and the end ; of the dark social scenes daguerreo-
typed in it; and of the Lordship of your Treasury to which
Nobody, driving a shameful bargain, raised this creature
when he was alive. Follow the whole story, and finish by lis-
130 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
tening to the parliamentary lawyers as they tell you that No-
body knows anything about it ; that Nobody is entitled ( from
the attorney point of view) to believe that there ever was
such a business at all ; that Nobody can be allowed to demand,
for decency's sake, the swift expulsion from the lawmaking
body of the surviving instrument in the heap of crime ; that
such expulsion is, in a word, just Nobody's business, and must
at present be constitutionally left to Nobody to do.
There is a great fire raging in the land, and — by all the
polite precedents and prescriptions ! — you shall leave it to
Nobody to put it out with a squirt, expected home in a year
or so. There are inundations bursting on the valleys, and —
by the same precedents and prescriptions ! — you shall trust
to Nobody to bale the water out with a bottomless tin ket-
tle. Nobody being responsible to you for his perfect suc-
cess in these little feats, and you confiding in him, you shall
go to Heaven. Ask for Somebody in his stead, and you shall
go in quite the contrary direction.
And yet, for the sake of Everybody, give me Somebody !
I raise my voice in the wilderness for Somebody. My heart,
as the ballad says, is sore for Somebody. Nobody has done
more harm in this single generation than Everybody can
mend in ten generations. Come, responsible Somebody ; ac-
countable Blockhead, come!
THE MURDERED PERSON
[OCTOBER 11, 1856]
JN an early number of this journal,1 we made some reference
to the fact that in the highly improving accounts which are
given to the public of the last moments of murderers, the
murdered person may be usually observed to be entirely dis-
missed from the moral discourses with which the murderer
favours his admiring audience, except as an incidental and
tributary portion of his own egotistical story.
iJPet Prisoner*.
THE MURDERED PERSON 131
To what lengths this dismissal of the very objectionable
personage who persisted in tempting the Saint in the con-
demned cell to murder him, may be carried, we have had a
recent opportunity of considering, in the case of the late la-
mented Mr. Dove. That amiable man, previous to taking
the special express-train to Paradise which is vulgarly called
the Gallows, indited a document wherein he made it manifest
to all good people that the mighty and beneficent Creator of
the vast Universe had specially wrought to bring it about
that he should cruelly and stealthily torture, torment, and by
inches slay, a weak sick woman, and that woman his wife, in
order that he Dove, as with the wings of a Dove (a little
blood-stained or so, but that's not much) should be put in
the way of ascending to Heaven.
Frightful as this statement is, and sickening as one would
suppose it must be, to any mind capable of humbly and rev-
erentially approaching at an inconceivable distance the idea,
of the Divine Majesty, there it stands in the printed records
of the day: a part of the Gaol Court-Newsman's account of
the visitors whom the chosen vessel received in his cell, of his
proposing to sing hymns in chorus in the night season, and
of the 'Prison Philanthropist' declaring him to be a pattern
penitent.
Now, to the Prison Philanthropist we concede all good
intentions. We take it for granted that the venerable gen-
tleman did not confer his alliterative title on himself, and that
he is no more responsible for it, than a public-house is for its
sign, or a ship for her figure-head. Yet, holding this hor-
rible confusion of mind on the part of the inhuman wretch
to whom he devoted so much humanity, to be shocking in
itself and widely perilous in its influences, we plainly avow
that we for our part cannot accept good intentions as any
set-off against the production of such a mental state, and
that we think the condemned cells everywhere (left to their
appointed ministers of religion who are very rarely deficient
in kindness and zeal) would be better without such philan-
thropy. What would the Home Secretary say to Professor
Holloway, if that learned man applied for free admission to
the condemned cells throughout England, in order that he
132 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
might with his ointment anoint the throats of the convicts
about to be hanged, so that under the influences of the appli-
cation their final sensations should be of a mild tickling?
What would the Home Secretary reply to the august mem-
bers of the Hygeian Council of the British College of Health,
if they made a similar request, with a view to the internal
exhibition for a similar purpose of that great discovery,
Morrison's pills? Even if some regular medical hand of emi-
nence were to seek the same privilege, with a view to a drug-
ging within the limits of the pharmacopoeia — say for the
philanthropic purpose of making the patient maudlin drunk
with opium and peppermint, and sending him out of this world
with a leer — how would the Home Secretary receive that edi-
fying proposal? And is there nothing of greater moment in-
volved in this revolting conceit, setting its heel on the mur-
dered body, and daring eternity on the edge of the mur-
derer's grave?
Pursue this advance made by the late Mr. Dove on the usual
calm dismissal of the murdered person, and see where it ends.
There are sent into this world two human creatures: one, a
highly interesting individual in whom Providence is much
concerned — Mr. Dove: one, a perfectly uninteresting indi-
vidual of no account whatever, here or hereafter — Mrs. Dove.
Mr. Dove being expressly wanted in the regions of the
blessed, Mrs. Dove is delivered over to him, soul and body,
to ensure his presence there, and provide against disappoint-
ment. There is no escape from this appalling, this impious
conclusion. The special Gaol-Call which was wanting to,
and was found by, Mr. Dove who is hanged, was wanting
to, and was not found by, Mrs. Dove who is poisoned. Thus,
the New Drop usurps the place of the Cross ; and Saint John
Ketch is preached to the multitude as the latest and holiest
of the Prophets !
Our title is so associated with the remembrance of this ex-
hibition, that we have been led into the present comments on
it. But, the purpose with which we adopted the title was
rather to illustrate the general prevalence of the practice of
putting the murdered person out of the question, and the ex-
THE MURDERED PERSON 133
tensive following which the custom of criminals has found
outside the gaols.
Two noble lords at loggerheads, each of whom signifi-
cantly suggests that he thinks mighty little of the capabili-
ties of the other, are blamed for certain disasters which did
undoubtedly befall, under their distinguished administration
of military affairs. They demand enquiry. A Board of
their particular friends and admirers is appointed 'to en-
quire'— much as its members might leave their cards for the
noble lords with that inscription. The enquiry is in the first
instance directed by one of the noble lords to the question — •
not quite the main question at issue — whether the Board cau
muzzle the Editor of the Times? The Board have the best
will in the world to do it, but, finding that the Editor de-
clines to be muzzled, perforce confess their inability to muz-
zle him. The enquiry then proceeds into anything else that
the noble lords like, and into nothing else that the noble lords
don't like. It ends in eulogiums on the soldierly qualities and
conduct of botfT lords, and clearly shows their fitness for
command to have been so completely exemplified, in failing,
that the inference is, if they had succeeded they would have
failed. The compliments ended, the Board breaks up (the
best thing it could possibly do, and the only function it is
fit for), the noble lords are decorated, and there is an end of
the matter.
How like the case of the late Mr. Dove! The murdered
person — by name the wasted forces and resources of Eng-
land— is not to be thought of ; or, if thought of, is only to be
regarded as having been expressly called into being for the
noble lords to make away with, and mount up to the seventh
Heaven of merit upon. The President of the Board (an-
swering to the Prison Philanthropist) sings paeans in the dark
to any amount, and the only thing wanting in the parallel,
is, the finishing hand of Mr. Calcraft.
Let us pass to another instance. The Law of Divorce is
in such condition that from the tie of marriage there is no
escape to be had, no absolution to be got, except under cer-
tain proved circumstances not necessary to enter upon here,
184 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and then only on payment of an enormous sum of money.
Ferocity, drunkenness, flight, felony, madness, none of these
will break the chain, without the enormous sum of money.
The husband who, after years of outrage, has abandoned his
wife, may at any time claim her for his property and seize
the earnings on which she subsists. The most profligate of
women, an intolerable torment, torture, and shame to her hus-
band, may nevertheless, unless he be a very rich man, insist
on remaining handcuffed to him, and dragging him away
from any happier alliance, from youth to old age and death.
Out of this condition of things among the common people,
out of the galling knowledge of the impossibility of relief —
aggravated, in cottages and single rooms, to a degree not
easily imaginable by ill-assorted couples who live in houses of
many chambers, and who, both at home and abroad, can keep
clear of each other and go their respective ways — vices and
crimes arise which no one with open eyes and any fair ex-
perience of the people can fail often to trace, from the Cal-
endars of Assizes, back to this source. It is*proposed a little
to relax the severity of a thraldom prolonged beyond the
bounds of morality, justice, and sense, and to modify the law.
Instantly the singing of pasans begins, and the murdered per-
son disappears! Authorities, lay and clerical, rise in their
parliamentary places to deliver panegyrics on Marriage as
an Institution (which nobody disputes to be just) ; they
have much to relate concerning what the Fathers thought of
it, and what was written, said, and done about it hundreds of
years before these evils were; they set up their fancy whip-
ping-tops, and whip away ; they utter homilies without end
upon the good side of the question, which is in no want of
them ; but, from their exalted state of vision the murdered
person utterly vanishes. The tortures and wrongs of the
sufferer have no place in their speeches. They felicitate
themselves, like the murderers, on their own glowing state
of mind, and they mount upon the mangled creature to de-
liver their orations, much as the Duke's man in the sham
siege took his post on the fallen governor of Barataria.
So in the case of overstrained Sunday observance, and de-
nial of innocent popular reliefs from labour. The murdered
135
person — the consumptive, scrofulous, rickety worker in un-
wholesome places, the wide prevalence of whose reduced physi-
cal condition has rendered it necessary to lower the standard
of health and strength for recruiting into the army, and
caused its ranks to be reinforced in the late war by numbers
of poor creatures notoriously in an unserviceable bodily
state — the murdered person, in this phase of his ubiquity, is
put out of sight, as a matter of course. We have flaming
and avenging speeches made, as if a bold peasantry, their
country's pride, models of cheerful health and muscular de-
velopment, were in every hamlet, town, and city, once a week
ardently bent upon the practice of asceticism and the re-
nunciation of the world; but, the murdered person, Legion,
who cannot at present by any means be got at once a week,
and who does nothing all that day but gloom and grumble
and deteriorate, is put out of sight as if none of us had ever
heard of him ! What is it to the holders forth, that wherever
we live, or wherever we go, we see him, and see him with so
much pity and dismay that we want to make him better by
other human means than those which have missed him? To
get rid of his memory, in the murdering way, and vaunt our-
selves instead, is much easier.
Bankrupts are declared, greedy speculators smash, and
bankers break. Who does not hear of the reverses of those
unfortunate gentlemen ; of the disruption of their establish-
ments ; of their wives being reduced to live upon their settle-
ments ; of the sale of their horses, equipages, picture^, wines ;
of the mighty being fallen, and of their magnanimity under
their reverses? But, the murdered person, the creditor, in-
vestor, depositor, the cheated and swindled under whatsoever
name, whose mind does he trouble? The mind of the fraudu-
lent firm? Enquire at the House of Detention, Clerkenwell,
London, and you will find that the last great fraudulent firm
was no more troubled about him, than Mr. Dove or Mr.
Palmer was by the client whom he 'did for,' in the way of
his different line of business.
And, lastly, get an order of admission to Sir Charles
Barry's palace any night in the session, and you will observe
the murdered person to be as comfortably stowed away as
136 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
he ever is at Newgate. What In said to Out in eighteen
hundred and thirty-five, what Out retorted upon In in eighteen
hundred and forty-seven, why In would have been Out in
eighteen hundred and fifty-four but for Out's unparalleled
magnanimity in not coming in, this, with all the contemptible
ins and outs of all the Innings and Outings, shall be dis-
coursed upon, with abundance of hymns and paeans on all
sides, for six months together. But, the murdered old gen-
tleman Time, and the murdered matron, Britannia, shall no
more come in question than the murdered people do in the
cells of the penitents — unless indeed they are reproduced, as
in the odious case with which we began, to show that they
were expressly created for the exaltation of the speech-
makers.
MURDEROUS EXTREMES
[JANUAEY 3, 1857]
OUR title may suggest a reference in the reader's mind, to
those much maligned persons, the ticket-of-leave men, who
at present favour the metropolis with more of their exem-
plary business-transactions than is appreciated with becom-
ing gratitude by an ungrateful public. It is not intended,
however, to have that significance. We have over and over
again in these pages dwelt upon the consequences to which a
preposterous encouraging and rewarding of prison hypoc-
risy, were inevitably leading. Whether they have ensued in
sufficient abundance (being met by a corresponding decreas
of efficiency in the Police), and whether the issuing of an
Order in Council, any time within the last six months, for
the incarceration and severe punishment of convicted of-
fenders enlarged upon commuted sentences, unable to show
that they were honestly employed, would have been as good
a symptom as the Income Tax of our really living under a
Government; all our readers can judge for themselves.
The Murderous Extremes to which we will, in very few
words, entreat serious attention, appear to us to have a re-
MURDEROUS EXTREMES 137
markable bearing on, and to be forcibly illustrated in, the
Parliament Street Murder; than which an outrage more bar-
barous in itself, or more disgraceful to the country, has not
been committed in England within a hundred years.
The only circumstances in this act of brutality which our
present object requires us to revive, are, that it was com-
mitted in a public shop (made the more public by being ex-
traordinarily small, and nearly all window), at an early hour
of the evening, in a great main thoroughfare of London;
that it was committed with bystanders looking on, and by-
passers asking what was the matter; that the blows of the
murderer, and the feeble groans of the murdered, were audible
in the public street to several persons ; and that not one of
them interfered, saving a poor errand boy.
Is it worth any man's while to ask himself the question,
how does it happen that a passiveness so shocking was dis-
played in such a case? Is it worth any man's while to ask
himself the question, how does it happen that a similar pas-
siveness, in similar cases, is actually becoming a part of the
national character, brave and generous though it is? For,
we assume that few can stop short at the Parliament Street
example, and comfortably tick it off as a Phenomenon, who
read with the least attention the reports of the Police Courts
and of the Criminal Trials: in which records, the same ugly
feature is constantly observable.
We have made bold to question our own mind on this
painful subject, and we find the answer plainly, in two mur-
derous extremes — in two wrestings of things good in them-
selves, to unnatural and ridiculous proportions.
Extreme the first:
It has been, for many years, a misfortune of the English
People to be, by those in authority, both over-disparaged and
over-praised. The disparagement has grown out of mere
arrogance and ignorance ; the praise, out of a groundless fear
of the people, and a timid desire to keep them well in hand.
A due respect for the Law is the basis of social existence.
Without it, we come to the Honourable Preston S. Brooks,
Kansas, and those two shining constellations among the
bright Stars of Freedom, known by the names of Bowie-
138 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
knife and Revolver. But, have none of us Englishmen heard
this tuneful fiddle with one string played upon, until our
souls have sickened of it? From the Bench, from the Bar,
from the Pulpit, from the Platform, from the Floor of the
House of Commons, from all the thousand fountain-heads of
boredom, have none of us been badgered and baited with an
Englishman's respect for the Law, until, in the singular
phraseology of Mr. Morier's Persian hero, our faces have
turned upside down, and our livers have resolved themselves
into water? We take leave to say, Yes; most emphatically,
Yes ! We avow for our own part, that whensoever, at public
meeting, dinner, testimonial-presentation, charity-election, or
other cpoutation ceremony, we find (which we always do), an
orator approaching an Englishman's respect for the Law,
our heart dries up within us, and terror paralyses our frame.
As the dreadful old clap-trap begins to jingle, we become
the prey of a deep-seated melancholy and a miserable despair.
We know the thing to have passed into a fulsome form, out
of which the life has gone, and into which putrefaction has
come. On common lips we perceive it to be a thing of no
meaning, and on lips of authority we perceive it to have grad-
ually passed into a thing of most pernicious meaning.
For, what does it mean? What is it? What has it come
to? 'My good man, John Bull, hold up your hand and
hear me! You are on no account to do anything for your-
self. You are by no means to stir a finger to help yourself,
or to help another man. Law has undertaken to take care
of you, and to take care of the other man, whoever he may
be. You are the foremost man of all this world, in regard
to respecting the Law. Call in the Law, John, on all occa-
sions. If you can find the Law round the corner, run after it
and bring it on the scene when you see anything wrong; but,
don't touch the wrong on any consideration. Don't you
interfere, whatever you see. It 's not y&wr business. Call
in the Law, John. You shall not take the Law into your own
hands. You are a good boy, John, and your business is to be
a bystander, and a looker on, and to be thought for, and
to be acted for. That 's the station of life unto which you.
are called. Law is an edge-tool, John, and a strong arm, and
MURDEROUS EXTREMES 139
you have nothing to do with it. Therefore, John, leave this
all-sufficient Law alone, to achieve everything for 'you, and
for everybody else. So shall you be ever, ever, the pride
and glory of the earth; so will we make patriotic speeches
about you, and sing patriotic songs about you, out of num-
ber !' So, by degrees, it is our sincere conviction, John gets
to be humbugged into believing that he is a first-rate citizen
if he looks in at a shop-window while a man is being mur-
dered, and if he quietly leaves the transaction entirely to
Law, in the person of the policeman who is not there. So,
when Law itself is down on the pavement in the person of the
policeman, with Brute Force dancing jigs upon his body,
John looks on with a faith in Law's coming uppermost some-
how or other, and with a perfect conviction that it is Law's
business, and not his.
Extreme the second:
Technicalities and forms of law, in reason, are essential to
the preservation of the liberties and rights of all classes of
men. No man has a greater or lesser interest in them than
another, since any man may be, at any time, in the position
of needing impartial justice. But, in its unreason, West-
minster Hall is a nuisance ; and, supposing Westminster Hall
in its unreason conspicuously to back up this grievous error
of John's, and conspicuously to supply him with a new dis-
trust of the terrible consequences of his not leaving mur-
derers with blood upon their hands to be taken solely by the
Law, Westminster Hall would be a very great nuisance and
a well-nigh insupportable nuisance. Supposing Westminster
Hall to make this mischievous idiot of itself at a very critical
time and under very famous circumstances, before the Par-
liament Street Murder was committed ; why, then Westminster
Hall might, in a pictorial representation of that terrible
cruelty, be reasonably represented as holding John's hands
while he looked in at the window, and as menacing John from
interfering.
Will the reader who may not remember the facts, look
back to what Westminster Hall said about the case of one
Barthelemy, who, having had the misfortune to murder an
old gentleman in Warren Street, Tottenham Court Road, was
140 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
escaping over a garden fence, when, being collared by a
meddlesome individual labouring under the absurd idea that
he ought to stop a Murderer as Law was not there to stop
him, he became virtuously indignant, and shot that meddle-
some person dead? In that case, which attracted great
attention, Westminster Hall solemnly argued and contended
before Lord Campbell that the meddlesome man shot dead,
had no right to stop the Murderer, and that the Murderer
had a right to shoot the meddlesome man shot dead, for
stopping him ! Before as upright and as sagacious a Judge
as ever graced the Bench, this almost incredible absurdity
could not prevail, and Westminster Hall was reduced to the
last feeble resource of moaning at the clubs until the ill-
used Murderer was hanged.
Turn from these two extremes to the window in Parliament
Street; see the people looking in, coming up, listening, ex-
changing a word or two, and passing on ; and say whether, at
the close of the year eighteen hundred and fifty-six, we find
for the first time Smoke without Fire.
STORES FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL
[MARCH 7, 1857]
ALL FOOLS'-DAY drawing near, it is a seasonable occupation
to calculate what we have in store for the occasion, and to
take stock of the provision in reserve, to meet the great de-
mand of the anniversary.
First (for the moment postponing the substantials of the
annual feast, and beginning with the spirits), we are happy
to report the existence in England, in its third volume, of
a Spiritual Telegraph 'and British Harmonial Advocate.'
Walled up in the flesh, as it is our personal and peculiar mis-
fortune to be, we are not in a condition to report upon the
derivation or meaning of the British adjective, Harmonial.
Unknown to Dr. Johnson in the body, it has probably been
2*evealed to him in the spirit, and by him been communicated
STORES FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL 141
to some favoured 'Medium.' The Hannonial Advocate is
published in one of the northern counties erewhile renowned
for horses, and which may yet be destined to establish a
celebrity for its acquaintance with another class of quad-
rupeds.
In the January Harmonial, we find a Bank for the First
of April, on which we will present our readers with a few
small drafts, which may enable them to form a proximate
idea of the value of its Rest. Its following extract from
'the British Court Journal,' of this last blessed eighteen
hundred and fifty-sixth Christmas-time, will show how far we
have travelled in all those years.
'One of our greatest English poets being in communication
with the medium, asked for the summons of Dante. The
presence of the latter was immediately made manifest by the
written answers returned to the questions of the inquirer,
and Mr. B — then asked the medium to request the great
Italian to make himself visible ! Presently there arose, as
if from the ground beneath the table, two long, thin, yellow
hands, unmistakable as to their Italian origin, undeniable as
to their having belonged to a student and a gentleman.
While the assembly were yet gazing in breathless awe, and
may be something of terror likewise, the hands floated
away, or were rather borne, as it were, across the room,
and rose to the marble console opposite, upon which stood
«, vase containing an orange tree in blossom. The hands
slowly and softly, without noise, but visibly to all, plucked
from the stem a sprig of orange flower with its leaves and
buds, and returning to the table, paused above the head of
Mrs. B — , the poet's wife, herself an exquisite and beautiful
poet likewise, and, placing the sprig upon her raven hair,
disappeared gradually from sight, seeming once more to
sink to the floor, while the audience remained speechless and
awe-struck, and but little inclined to renew the experiment,
that same night, at all events. The sprig of orange blos-
som is religiously preserved by Mrs. B — , whose honour
and truth are unimpeachable; while the witnesses gathered
round the table at the time of the occurrence all testify to the
apparition, as well as to the utter unconsciousness of the
142 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
medium, who neither spoke nor moved during the whole
time the circumstance was taking place.' —
We happen to have had communicated to our humble
bodily individuality by a letter of the alphabet, remarkably
like B, some emphatic references to a similar story ; and
they were not merely associated with the production of two
hands, but with the threatened production of one foot —
the latter not a spiritual, but a corporeal foot, considered
as a means of impelling the biped, Man, down a staircase.
We learn from the same pages that Mr. J. J. of Peckham,
went into an appointed house at Sandgate-by-the-Sea, last
autumn, at four of the clock in the afternoon, and unto him
entered the Medium, evidently suffering from physical pros-
tration, spiritual knockings immediately afterwards hailed
the advent of J. J., and in answer to the question, Were the
spirits pleased with Mr. J. J. of Peckham being there? 'the
rappings, as if on the under-side of the table, were rapid and
joyous, and as loud as if made with a hand-hammer' ; being
probably made, we would deferentially suggest, by the
ghost of the celebrated 'Harmonial' blacksmith. Iri the
evening a loo-table politely expressed its happiness in making
the acquaintance of the visitor from Peckham, by suspending
itself in the air 'clear of the floor, about eight inches.' On
another occasion, a lady of London, attending her uncle dur-
ing his last illness, was gratified by a spectacle such as has
been hitherto hidden from the ardent desires of the best of
mankind, and saw her uncle 'floating out from under the bed-
clothes,' accompanied by two angels with whom he floated out
of window, 'and continued to float and rise till out of sight.'
This lady is described as Mrs. G., and may, perhaps, have
been Mrs. Gamp, in professional attendance on the late Mr.
Harris. On another occasion, Mr. J. G. had the following
little experience: 'One evening, after having seen a great
many extraordinary lifts, by the table frequently springing
from the floor to a great height, and in that manner keep-
ing time to tunes, etc., with an understanding that the per-
former was the Spirit of Burns the poet, the company had
nearly all retired, leaving only the medium, her father, and
myself at the table, when finally the father fell asleep, and
the medium retired to a distance from the table, leaving me
alone sitting at the table reading Burns's Poems, by the light
of a candle placed on the middle of the table ; I was just in the
act of reading the song Wandering Willie, and was mak-
ing a remark to the medium that it was an old favourite of
mine, when I heard a movement, and the medium said, "the
table is moving of its own accord." I instantly stopped
reading, and having heard of tables moving without touch,
I thought I might perhaps be gratified with a movement
of that kind. I therefore said, "If this is really the Spirit
of Burns, will he be kind enough to gratify me by a move-
ment of the table without any human touch?" Almost
immediately afterwards, it commenced cracking as if a
heavy weight had been pressing upon it, and it then gave a
sudden rush on the floor, perhaps to the distance of a foot,
when it stopped.' On another occasion the same gentle-
man saw 'a very heavy oak-table, weighing some few
stones, fly up like a rocket,' and heard a lady make the
singular request to her husband's spirit, that he would, as
a particular favour, 'throw' this heavy oak-table, weighing
some few stones, 'over on her knee,' and 'upset it into her
lap.' These extraordinary proofs of a love surviving beyond
the grave, her husband affectionately accorded, but with
what painful results to the lady's legs is not mentioned. On
another occasion Mrs. Coan, Medium, was tested by 'the New
York Philosophical Society of the Mechanics' Institution,*
when a Spirit made the following startling disclosure 'Did
you leave a wife? Yes. — Did you leave children? No
answer. — Did you leave a child? Yes. — Was it a girl? No.
— Was it a boy? Yes.'
Mr. Robert Owen, who, as was formerly announced in
this journal, received a special message from the spiritual
world informing him that he would certainly succeed in his
object of re-modelling society, if he inserted an advertise-
ment in the Morning Post, has made large provision for the
First of April. It is at present stored in a warehouse called
the Millennial Gazette, established for the purpose of pro-
claiming to mankind that: 'A CONGRESS of the advanced
minds of the world, to consider the best immediate practic-
144 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
able mode of gradually superseding the false, ignorant, un-
just, cruel, wicked, and most irrational system of society,
opposed to the righteous laws of God and nature, and which
hitherto has been the only system known to man, — by the
true, enlightened, just, merciful, good, and rational system
of society, in strict accordance with the all-wise laws of
God and nature, will be opened at noon precisely, on the
fourteenth of May next, in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre,
London, the present metropolis of the world — when will be
explained the outline of the change which is highly to benefit
all of the human race through futurity, and to injure none,
even while passing through its first or transition generation,
preliminary to the attainment of its full change, which will
be the commencement of the long-promised millennium.'
It is foreseen that the debates of this assemblage (to
which Mr. Owen invites 'the Sovereign Powers of the civilised
world to send their most talented representatives, possessing
firm integrity of character' — who will no doubt attend in
great numbers) will take time. It is therefore announced
that the Congress 'will be continued day by day from ten A.
M. to three P.M., until this great work of reformation for the
lasting advantage of all of human kind shall be brought
to a satisfactory termination.' We fear this may cause Mr.
Hullah some little inconvenience; but, it is pleasant to con-
sider, on the other hand, what an enormous amount of rent
that respected gentleman will receive for the long occupation
of his Hall. 'Superior spirits,' it appears, are taking great
interest in the Congress, and among the mortals who will
attend, we hope Mr. Samuel Clark, Medium, of 'Beaverton,
Boone Co., 111., U.S.' may be expected. This gentleman
writes to the convener: 'DEAR SIR, I never heard your name
nor the right foundation of the principles that you are
advocating to the world until a few weeks ago I came into
my house at noon and there lay your Millennial Gazette,
but the cover not removed, and as I took it into my hand to
open it a divine spiritual influence dropt over me, as if a
mantle of light and harmony was cast over me by some in-
visible power. It vibrated through my entire system, and
by that I knew I held something holy and true in my hand.
STORES FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL 145
I opened and great was my delight there to find the princi-
ples plainly laid before me, which I had been trying to
advocate in public for some time past, with spiritualism
combined, having been a medium some ten months, speak-
ing in public, languages that I do not understand, and some-
times no person present understood not even one word. I
have seen spirits and had them touch me, have seen the
most beautiful visions, and healed the sick by laying on of
hand by the same invisible power.' Mr. Clark sends like-
wise this apostrophe from Beaverton, Boone Co., 111., U.S.:
'But I should love to see and hear thee, oh thou noble cham-
pion of truth. One favour I ask. If you are taken to the
purer spiritual life before me, then throw thy holy influence
on me, to convince the sceptical, and to help me speak the
truth, impress me with your ideas. This you can do on a
medium, by and through the laws of unity which exist be-
tween individual spirits of pure harmony.'
There appears to be no doubt that important communica-
tions from this gentleman may be confidently expected (in
the language of which nobody understands one word), on
the First of April.
Dismissing, here, this branch of the preparations for the
feast of unreason, we pass to a joke happily conceived for the
First of April, though we doubt its success in making as
complete a fool of the British Public as is desired. An old
captain of the Welsh Fusileers has translated into French
and published at Brussels, for the edification and something-
else-ification of the French people, a paper originally written
by Mr. Hayward for an English Review, and therein pub-
lished in the English tongue. Mr. Hayward is correctly
described in the Preface as 'Queen's Counsel, and distin-
guished man of letters' ; and he is further described as hav-
ing, for the purposes of the translation, corrected his work,
and enlarged it with a variety of information drawn from
the most authentic sources. Its object is to show that the
English people had, in the beginning, the most exaggerated
expectations of the war with Russia; that they were fully
persuaded that everything would go on of itself (que tout
marcherait tout seul), though we suppose they may be
146 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
allowed to have had some dim impression, at least, that a vast
amount of their money would go off in helping it on ; that
nearly all the privations and sufferings of the English army
'may be accounted for without imputing any serious blame
to any minister, civil or military officer, or chief of depart-
ment, whether in London or whether in the Crimea' ; and that
'nobody of good faith who is acquainted with the spirited
reply of Lord Lucan ( !), who has read the lucid address
of Sir Richard Airey ( !), or who has studied the extra-
ordinary evidence of Colonel Tulloch before the Chelsea com-
mission ( !), will hesitate to pronounce a sentence of honour-
able acquittal.' The sufficient cause and reason of any little
British failure (if any) that ill-conditioned journalists pre-
tended to observe in the Crimea, and of any slight superfluous
suffering and death (if any) that occurred among the British
troops, is to be found in the alterations rendered necessary
in the character of the army's operations, after those opera-
tions were arranged at Varna, and in the remissness of the
French; the soldiers of which distracted nation (with the
occasional exception of a Zouave or so) were never ready,
were always behind time, were not to be relied upon, and
were handled by their generals with timidity and incertitude.
M. de Bazancourt having, with the not very generous con-
currence of his master the Emperor, written a turbid, in-
flated, and partial account of the War in the Crimea
(which, making every allowance for a Frenchman's not
being specially predestined to write in the style of the Duke
of Wellington, he has indisputably done), Mr. Hay ward
sets the matter right, and brings the French mind to a per-
fect understanding of the truth, by means of these lights and
explanations (eclaircissements) on the subject.
It happens, however — perversely, with a view to the First
of April — that Colonel Tulloch, who seems to have no relish
for All Fools'-day, and no perception of the humour of the
jokes appropriate to it, comes out arrayed in plain English
attire, at about the same time as Mr. Hayward appears in
his French suit, and offers his little lights and explanations
on the same subject. Colonel Tulloch's 'eclaircissements' are
contained in a Review of the Proceedings and Report of the
STORES FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL 147
Chelsea Board: and they incontestably prove, beyond the
power of disproof by man of woman born, every conceiv-
able detail of murderous muddle and mismanagement, by
English administrators of one kind or another in the Crimea,
on every imaginable head on which it was possible to do
wrong, from the article of coatees up to hospital medicines
and down again to coffee. They prove these imbecilities,
too, out of the lips of his own opponents, making their own
statements in their own defence before a one-sided tribunal
constantly wresting the case out of the truth, by stopping
short when they see that damnatory pea in danger of rolling
out from among the thimbles. Whether Colonel Tulloch
shows the spirited replyer, Lord Lucan, to have called cavalry
officers to prove that nothing more could have been done than
was done towards the sheltering of the horses, whom he had
himself, in writing, under his own hand, severely censured
for 'doing nothing' towards that sheltering for five long win-
ter weeks ; whether he shows that in the Crimea the same
noble and spirited replyer would not hear of sailcloth for
the covering-in of horses, and that at Aldershot it is now
extensively used for that very purpose ; or whether he shows
that the vast idea never presented itself to the collective
wisdom of a whole brigade in want of barley, that it was
possible, instead of sending horses all the way to Balaclava
to fetch it, to send them half the way, and there let them
meet the commissariat beasts, relieve them of their load, and
turn back again ; or whether he shows the English soldiers
to have been perishing by thousands, abject scarecrows in
rags that would not hold together, 'while their knapsacks were
on the Black Sea, their squad-bags at Scutari, thousands of
pairs of trousers missing, thousands of coatees unused, and
tens of thousands of great-coats, blankets, and rugs, filling
the Quarter-Master General's stores, or the harbour of Bala-
clava' ; or whether he shows the Board to attribute the non-
supply of those vital essentials, to the deficiency of trans-
port to the front, whereas that very kind of transport was
at that very time going on with shot and shell and the like
to an enormous extent, and whereas Sir John Campbell and
Sir Richard England both positively stated to the Board,
148 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
that they had never received any intimation whatever from
the Quarter-Master General, that such things were to be got
for the sending for, or were there at all ; or whether he shows
it to be alleged as a reason for not issuing coatees to the
men, that they were too small, 'by reason of the great
quantity of underclothing worn by them,' at a time when
the identical men are to a dead certainty known to have had
no under-clothing whatever; or whether he shows the Assist-
ant Commissary General's accounts to pretend that within a
certain time three hundred and fifty thousand pounds weight
(in round numbers), of vegetables were issued to the starving
troops, of which quantity two hundred and seventy-three
thousand pounds weight (in round numbers), are after-
wards admitted to have been destroyed, while the greater
part of the rest was scrambled for in Balaclava harbour and
never issued; or whether he shows that when the Chelsea
Board compassionate the Commissary General for having no
transports to get fresh meat in, while the soldiers were dying
of diseases caused by salt meat, there were Sixteen available
transports lying idle at their moorings in Balaclava harbour ;
or whether he shows the same Commissary when the men
where dying for want of lime-juice, never to have reported
to Lord Raglan that there was the small item of twenty
thousand pounds weight of lime-juice stored there, in the
Crimea, on the spot, ready for use ; or whether he shows the
Chelsea Board in their Report, after all the mischief is done
and all the misery is irreparable, to be still, to the last, so
like their own championed Incapables, as, in their printed
report, to be found quoting evidence that was never given,
and assigning explanations to witnesses who never offered
them ; in whatever he does from the first to the last page
of his Review of a Board whose constitution and proceedings
were an outrage on common sense, the lights of Colonel
Tulloch make the lights of Mr. Hayward darkness, rout the
whole host of spirited replyers with frightful loss and dis-
comfiture, and show no toleration whatever of the First of
April.
To us, who admire that institution, and love to contem-
plate the provision made and making for it, this is no service.
STORES FOR THE FIRST OF APRIL 149
We regard Colonel Tulloch as rather a dull man, wanting
the due zest and relish for a joke, and conscious of no com-
punction in knocking a choice one on the head. Yet we
descry a kind of humour in him, too, when he quotes this
letter from the late Duke of Wellington to General Fane.
'I wish I had it in my power to give you well-clothed
troops, or to hang those who ought to have given them
their clothing.
'Believe me, etc.,
'WELLINGTON.'
— which is really an 'eclaircissement' extremely satisfactory to
our odd way of thinking, and perhaps the next spirited reply
on record after Lord Lucan's.
Consenting, in the good humour with which this pithy
document inspires us, to consider Colonel Tulloch reconciled
to the First of April, we will pass to a cursory examination
of some more of its stores.
A contribution to the general stock, of a rather remark-
able nature, has been made by the reverend Ordinary of
Newgate, in his report to the Lord Mayor and court of alder-
men, as we find it quoted in the Times of Wednesday the
eleventh of February. The reverend gentleman writes (in
singular English) :
'I have often thought, and still think, that the origin of
garotte robberies took place from the exhibition of the way
the Thugs in India strangle and plunder passengers, as
exhibited in the British Museum. However valuable as illus-
trations of Indian manners such representations may be, I
could heartily wish that these models were placed in some
more obscure position, and cease to be that which I fear they
have been, the means of giving to men addicted to crime and
violence an idea how their evil purposes may be accom-
plished.'
Now, setting aside the fact notorious to all men — on the
first of April — that the desperate characters of the
metropolis are in the habit of fatiguing themselves with the
study of the British Museum, and that the worst of the
150 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Ticket-of-leave men may be invariably found there, between
the hours of ten and four, annotating their catalogues with
great diligence, we take leave to protest against this reverend
gentleman's doctrine, as utterly nonsensical in itself, and sur-
passingly insulting to the people. Here indeed is our old
enemy Sloggins, with the broken nose, the black eye, and the
bulldog, at his old work in a rampant state ! Because Slog-
gins abuses, nobody shall use. There is habitual drunken-
ness in the house of Sloggins, and therefore there shall not
be temperate enjoyment in the house of Moderation; there
is perversion of every gift of a gracious Creator on the part
of this beast, and therefore the gifts shall be taken away
from a million of well-conducted people. We declare that
we believe the cruelty (however unintentional) of the
reverend gentleman's proposition to be as gigantic as its
injustice. It is a striking illustration of the purblind, one-
sided, left-handed, monomaniacal vice of the time, which, de-
ferring to the pests of society, would make England, for its
toiling and much-enduring honest masses, one vast Penitenti-
ary. Of what entertainment, of what knowledge, of what
artificial relief that this earth can afford them, may the
people out of Newgate not be deprived by a parity of rea-
soning? All traces of Mr. Layard's discoveries must be
instantly put out of the way. They shew the Ordinary's
precious charges how to bind people's hands behind their
backs, and how to lop off people's heads. Peter's part in
the New Testament must be sealed up, or we shall have a
policeman's ear cut off. Romeo and Juliet must be inter-
dicted, in remembrance of Mr. Palmer's having purchased
poison, and lest Mr. Sloggins should think of administer-
ing a sleeping draught. The publication of King Lear must
be stopped by the Attorney-General, or a fiendish way of
plotting against his brother will inevitably be put into young
Mr. Sloggins's head. Tolerate Hamlet again, on any stage,
and you shall hear from the Ordinary of there being some-
body 'in trouble,' on suspicion of having poured poison into
the ear of a near relation. The Merchant of Venice must
be got with all dispatch into the State Gazette, or, so sure as
you are born, Mr. Sloggins will have a pound of flesh from
STORES FOU THE FIRST OF APRIL 151
you as you go home one night. Prohibit Paradise Lost
without a moment's loss of time, or Mr. Sloggins will get
all the arguments of the Evil One into his head, and will mis-
quote them against the Ordinary himself before he is a Sessions
older. Burns must not be heard ; Hogarth must not be seen.
Sloggins never had a holiday that he did not misuse; there-
fore let no man have a holiday any more. Sloggins would
raise a Devil out of any Art or Grace in life ; therefore ham-
string all the Arts and Graces, and lock the cripples up.
Yet, even when you have done all this, and have cast the
Thug figures into impenetrable obscurity, so ingenious is
Mr. Sloggins, and such a knack of distorting the purest
models has that exacting gentleman, that who shall ensure
the Ordinary, after all, against Mr. Sloggins's declaring,
one fine First of April, that 'he bin and got the idea o'
garrotin',' from a certain lawful procession at eight o'clock
in the morning, in which the Ordinary himself formed a
conspicuous figure !
Among the commodities in store for All Fools'-day, we
find a large quantity of expectations. It is expected to be
known, then, by whose authority comfortable little arrange-
ments are made for the absence of the Police when the worst
characters in London come together to describe the Police as
their natural and implacable enemies — which, it is to be
hoped, they will long remain. It is expected to be known,
then (and that through the agency of some Member of Par-
liament), whether the managing Police Commissioner takes
the responsibility of this very dangerous proceeding, or
whether the Home Secretary takes it; and whether the re-
sponsibility of either functionary is a sufficient justification
of it. On the same occasion it is expected that Somebody
(official) will rise in both houses of Parliament, with a plain
speech to this effect: 'We hear, my lords and gentlemen, a
great deal said about youthful profligacy and corruption, in
search of which we are perpetually poking our heads into
Singing Rooms and Acting Rooms, and where not, and
worrying mankind grey with the shying and backing and
jibbing of a variety of hobbies; but, at any rate, we may
all know, through the evidence of our own ears, that one of
152 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the most prolific sources of that profligacy and corruption
is always rife and unchecked in our streets: where more
abominable language is currently and openly used chiefly
by young boys and young men than in all the rest of
Europe. Now, my lords and gentlemen, we have the remedy
for this, ready made, in the last Police Bill, where the use
of bad language, in any public place, is made an offence
punishable by fine or imprisonment. And, to begin
plainly, at the beginning, without any prancing of hobbies
in circles, we have just come to the conclusion that this law
shall not be suffered to remain a Dead Letter, but shall, on
special instruction, be enforced by the Police; and so, with
GOD'S help and yours, we will, at least, shut one of the
stable-doors, standing wide open in our full view, before the
steed is stolen.' 1 On the same occasion, the same Somebody
(still speaking officially) is expected to announce, within the
compass of half an hour by the clock, that he holds in his
hand a Bill for the taking into custody by the strong arm,
of every neglected or abandoned child of either sex, found in
the streets of any town in this kingdom ; for the training and
education of that child, in honest knowledge and honest
labour; for the heavy punishment of the parents if they can
by any means be found; for making it compulsory on them
to contribute to the costs and charges of the rearing of those
children out of their earnings, no matter what ; but, for their
summary and final deprivation of all rights, as parents, over
the young creatures they would have driven to perdition ; and
for the transfer of those rights to the State. It is expected
that the Preamble of such Bill will set forth that the human
heart can no longer bear the affecting spectacle of beautiful
childhood made repulsive and shocking, which every great
town presents; and that human faith cannot believe in the
Divine endurance of such iniquity as the standing by and
looking at it, without a terrible retribution.
i The writer has himself obtained a conviction by a police magistrate,
under this Act, for this shameful and demoralising offence — which is
as common and as public as the mud in the streets. He obtained it
with difficulty, the charge not being within the experience of any one
concerned; but, he insisted on the law, and it was clear (wonderful to
relate!), and was enforced.
THE BEST AUTHORITY 153
It is further expected that the subject will occasion half
as much interest at Westminister, and draw half as full a
Lower House, as a pitched battle of 'I say you did' and 'I
say you didn't' between M. and N., or as the appearance
arm-in-arm, instead of fist to fist, of A. and Z. This ex-
travagant notion, as by far the greatest of all extravagances
we have recorded, may aptly close the list of Stores for the
Day of All Fools.
THE BEST AUTHORITY
[JUNE 20,1857]
I WISH he was not so ubiquitous.
I wish he was not always having people to dine with him,
into whom he crams all manner of confidences, and who
come from his too hospitable board to harass my soul with
special intelligence (which is never true), upon all the sub-
jects that arise in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. I
wish to Heaven he would dine out !
Yet, that i* a weak wish, because he does dine out. He
makes a habit of dining out. He is always dining out.
How could I be the confused, perplexed, benighted wretch I
am, but for everybody I know, meeting him at dinner
everywhere, and receiving information from him which they
impart to me? I wish he would hold his tongue !
Yet, that is another weak wish, because when he does
hold his tongue, I am none the better for it. His silence is
used against me. If I mention to my friend, Pottington,
any little scrap of fact of which in my very humble way I
may have become possessed, Pottington says, that 's very
odd, he hardly thinks it can be, he will tell me why; dining
yesterday at Croxford's he happened to sit next to the Best
Authority, and had a good deal of talk with him, and yet he
never said a word to lead him to suppose —
This brings me to inquire how does it happen that every-
body always sits next him? At a dinner of eighteen per-
sons, I have known seventeen sit next him. Nay, at a public
154 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
dinner of one hundred and thirty, I have known one hundred
and twenty-nine sit next him. How is it done? In his
ardent desire to impart special intelligence to his fellow-men,
does he shift his position constantly, and sit upon all the
chairs in the social circle successively? If he does so, it is
obvious that he has no moral right to represent to each
individual member of the company that his communication is
of an exclusive character, and that he is impelled to it by
strong personal consideration and respect. Yet I find that
he invariably makes some such representation. I augur from
this, that he is a deceiver.
What is his calling in life, that it leaves him so much time
upon his hands? He is always at all the clubs — must spend
a respectable income in annual club subscriptions alone. He
is always in all the streets, and is met in the market-places by
all sorts and conditions of men. Who is his bootmaker?
Who cuts his corns? He is always going up and down the
pavements, and must have corns of a prodigious size.
I object to his being addicted to compliments and flattery.
I boldly publish this accusation against him, because I have
several respected friends who would scorn to compliment
themselves, whom he is always complimenting. For example.
He meets my dear Flounceby (whom I regard as a brother),
at a mutual friend's — there again! He is mutual friends
with everybody ! — and I find that he prefaces his communica-
tions to Flounceby, with such expressions as these : 'Mr.
Flounceby, I do not wish what I am about to mention, to go
any further; it is a matter of some little delicacy which I
should not consider myself justified in speaking of to general
society ; but, knowing your remarkable powers, your delicate
discrimination, and great discretion,' etc. All of which, my
dear Flounceby, in the modest truthfulness of his nature,
feels constrained to repeat to me! This is the Best Au-
thority's didactic style ; but, I observe him also, by incidental
strokes, artfully to convey complimentary touches of charac-
ter into casual dialogue. As when he remarks, in refer-
ence to some handsome reticence on my friend's part, 'Ah
Flounceby ! Your usual reserve in committing others !' Or,
'Your expressive eye, my dear Mr. Flounceby, discloses what
THE BEST AUTHORITY 155
jour honourable tongue would desire to conceal !' And the
like. All of which, Flounceby, in his severe determination
to convey to me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, repeats, with evident pain to his modesty.
Is he a burglar, or of the swell mob? I do not accuse
him of occupying either position (which would be libellous),
but I ask for information. Because my mind is tormented
by his perpetually getting into houses into which he would
seem to have no lawful open way, and by his continually
diving into people's pocket-books in an otherwise inexplicable
manner. In respect of getting into the Queen's Palace, the
Boy Jones was a fool to him. He knows everything that
takes place there. On a late auspicious occasion when the
nation was hourly expecting to be transported with joy
for the ninth time, it is surprising what he knew on the ques-
tion of Chloroform. Now, Dr. Locock is known to be the
most trustworthy even of doctors; and Her Majesty's self-
reliance and quiet force of character have passed into an
axiom. I want to know, therefore, How, When, Where, and
From Whom, did the Best Authority acquire all that chloro-
form information which he was, for months, prowling about
all the clubs, going up and down all the streets, having all
London to dine with him, and going out to dine with all
London, for the express purpose of diffusing? I hope
society does not demand that I should be slowly bothered to
death by any man, without demanding this much satisfaction.
How did he come by his intelligence, I ask? The Best
Authority must have had an authority. Let it be produced.
I have mentioned the pocket-books in which he deciphers
secret entries; many of them written, probably, in invisible
ink, for they are non-existent even to the owner's eyes.
How does he come by all the ambassador's letter-bags, and
by all the note-books of all the judges? Who gave him all
the little scraps of paper that the late Mr. Palmer wrote and
handed about in the course of his protracted trial? He
tells all sorts of people what was in them all; he must have
seen them surely. Who made out for him the accounts cf
this journal? Who calculated for him the sum total of
profit? And when will it be quite convenient to him to name
156 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
an early day for handing over to the Conductor the very
large balance, with several ciphers at the end of it, which
clearly must be owing the said Conductor, as he has never
laid hands on it yet?
How did he get into the Russian lines? He was always
there; just as he was always in the English camp, and always
coming home to put Mr. Russell right, and going back
again. It was he who found out that the Commissariat
wouldn't give the Times rations of pork, and that the pork-
less Times would never afterwards leave the Commissariat
alone. Had he known much of the Russian leaders before
the war, that he began to talk of them so familiarly by
their surnames as soon as the first gun was fired? Will any
of us ever forget while memory holds her seat in these dis-
tracted globes, our aching heads, what we suffered from this
man in connection with the Redan? Can the most Chris-
tian of us ever forgive the lies he told us about the
Malakhoff? I might myself overlook even those injuriess
but for his having put so many people up to making plans
of that detested fortress, on tablecloths, with salt-spoons,
forks, dessert-dishes, nut-crackers, and wine-glasses. Which
frightful persecution, a thousand times inflicted on me, upon
his authority — the best — I hereby swear never to condone !
Never shall the Sapping and Mining knowledge, stamped
in characters of lead upon this burning brow, remain with
me but as a dreadful injury stimulating me to devote the
residue of my life to vengeance on the Best Authority. If
I could have his blood, I would! I avow it, in fell remem-
brance of the baying hounds of Boredom with which he
hunted me in the days of the Russian war.
Will he, on this public challenge, stand forward foot to
foot against me, his mortal enemy, and declare how he can
justify his behaviour? Why am I, a free-born Briton, who
never, never will — or rather who never, never would, if I
could help it — why am I to truckle to this tyrant all the
days of my life? Why is the Best Authority, Gesler-like,
to set his hat upon a pole in the epergne of every dinner
table, in the hall of every club-house, in the stones of every
street, and, violating the Charter proclaimed by the Guardian
THE BEST AUTHORITY 157
Angels who sang that strain, to demand me for his slave?
What does he mean by his unreasonable requirement that I
shall make over my five senses to him? Who is he that he
is to absorb my entity into his non-entity? And are not
these his appetites? I put it to Flounceby.
Flounceby is rather an obstinate character (Mrs. Flounceby.
says the most obstinate of men ; but, that may be her im-
pulsive way of expressing herself), and will argue with you
on any point, for any length of time you like — or don't
like. He is certain to beat you, too, by a neat method he
has of representing you to have said something which you
never did say, or so much as think of, and then indignantly
contradicting it. No further back than within this month,
Flounceby was holding forth at a great rate on the most
argumentative question of all questions — which every ques-
tion is with him, and therefore I simply mean any question —
and had made out his case entirely to his own satisfaction, and
was pounding his dinner-company of six with it, as if they
were plastic metal, and he and the question were the steam-
hammer; when an unknown man of faint and fashionable
aspect (one of the six) slided out from under the hammer
without any apparent effort, and flatly denied Flounceby's
positions, one and all, 'on the best authority.' If he had
contested them on any ground of faith, reason, probability,
or analogy, Flounceby would have pinned him like a bull-
dog; but, the mere mention of the Best Authority (it was
a genteel question in its bearings) instantly laid Flounceby
on his back. He turned pale, trembled, and gave in. It
happened, however, as it always does at Flounceby's, that
the next most argumentative question of questions came on
immediately afterwards. Upon that point I, deriving cour-
age from the faint and fashionable man, who by the way
from the moment of his victory, retired, like lago, and word
spake never more — opposed myself to Flounceby. I had
not been rolled and flattened under the steam-hammer two
minutes, when Flounceby, throwing the machinery out of
gear, gave me one final crush from the Best Authority, and
left me for dead. Goaded to distraction by the anonymous
oppressor, I wildly cried that I cared nothing for the Best
158 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Authority. A shudder went round the table, and all present
shrank from me, as if I had distinctly made the one greatest
and most audacious denial of which humanity is capable.
Still goaded by this oppressor — always goaded by this
oppressor — I ask, Who is he? Whence does he come when
he goes out to dinner; where does he give those dinners at
which so many people dine? Was he enrolled in the last
census? Does he bear his part in the light burdens of the
country? Is he assessed to the equitable income-tax? I call
upon the Best Authority to stand forth.
On more than one occasion I have thought I had him. In
that portion of Pall Mall, London, which is bounded on the
east by the Senior United Service Club House, and on the
west by the Carlton Club House — a miasmatic spot, in which
I suppose more boredom to be babbled daily, than in any
two thousand square miles on the surface of the earth —
— into that dismal region I had sometimes tracked the des-
pot, and there lost him. One day, upon the steps of the
Athenaeum, of which eminent institution I have the honour
to be a member, I found a fellow-member, Mr. Prowler, of
the Royal Society of Arts, lying in wait, under the portico,
to pour a drop of special information into the ear of every
man and brother who approached the temple. Mr. Prowler
is a grave and secret personage, always specially informed,
who whispers his way through life; incessantly acting Midas
to everybody else's Reed. He goes about, like a lukewarm
draught of air, breathing intelligence into the ears of his
fellow-men, and passing on. He had often previously
brought me into trouble, and caused me to be covered with
confusion and shame. On this occasion the subject-matter
of this confidence was — if I may be allowed the expression —
so much more than usually impossible that I took the liberty
to intimate my sense of its irreconcilability with all laws
human and divine, and to ask him from whom he had his
information? He replied, from the Best Authority; at the
same time implying, with a profound and portentous move-
ment of his head, that that mysterious Being had just
gone in. I thought the hour was come — rushed into the
THE BEST AUTHORITY 159
hall — and found nobody there, but a weak old gentleman, to
all appearance harmlessly idiotic, who was drying his pocket-
handkerchief before the fire, and gazing over his shoulder
at two graceful leathern institutions, in the form of broken
French bedsteads without the pole, which embellish that chaste
spot and invite to voluptuous repose.
On another occasion, I was so near having my hand at my
enemy's throat and he so unaccountably eluded me, that a
brief recital of the circumstances may aptly close this paper.
The pursuit and escape occurred at the Reform Club, of
which eminent Institution likewise, I have the honour to be
a member. As I know the Best Authority to pervade that
building constantly, my eye had frequently sought him, with
a vague sense of the supernatural and an irresistible feeling of
dread, in the galleries overhanging the hall where I had but
too often heard him quoted. No trace of his form, however,
had revealed itself to me. I had frequently been close upon
him ; I had heard of him as having 'just gone down to the
House,' or 'just come up'; but, between us there had been
a void. I should explain that in the palatial establishment of
which I write, there is a dreadful little vault on the left of
the Hall, where we hang up our hats and coats ; the gloom
and closeness of which vault, shade the imagination. I was
crossing the Hall to dinner, in the height of the then Session
of Parliament, when my distinguished friend, O'Boodleom
(Irish Member), being disappointed of a man of title, whom
he was waiting to stun with a piece of information which
he had just telegraphed to Erin, did me the honour to dis-
charge that weapon upon me. As I had every conceivable
reason to know that it could not possibly be correct, I defer-
entially asked O'Boodleom from whom he had received it?
'Bedad, sir,' says he — and, knowing his sensitive bravery, I
really felt grateful to him, for not saying, 'Blood, sir!'-
'Bedad, sir,' says he, 'I had it, a while ago, from the Best
Authority, and he's at this moment hanging up the entire of
his coat and umberreller in the vault.' I dashed into the
vault, and seized (as I fondly thought) the Best Authority,
to cope with him at last in the death-struggle. It was only
160 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
my cousin Cackles, admitted on all hands to be the most
amiable ass alive, who inoffensively asked me if I had heard
the news?
The Best Authority was gone! How gone, whither gone,
I am in no condition to say. I again, therefore, raise my
voice, and call upon him to stand forward and declare himself.
CURIOUS MISPRINT IN THE
'EDINBURGH REVIEW
[AUGUST 1, 1857]
THE Edinburgh Review, in an article in its last number, on
'The License of Modern Novelists,' is angry with Mr. Dickens
and other modern novelists, for not confining themselves to
the mere amusement of their readers, and for testifying in
their works that they seriously feel the interest of true Eng-
lishmen in the welfare and honour of their country. To
them should be left the making of easy occasional books for
idle young gentlemen and ladies to take up and lay down
on sofas, drawing-room tables, and window-seats ; to the
Edinburgh Review should be reserved the settlement of all
social and political questions, and the strangulation of all
complainers. Mr. Thackeray may write upon Snobs, but
there must be none in the superior government departments.
There is no positive objection to Mr. Reade having to do, in
a Platonic way, with a Scottish fishwoman or so; but he
must by no means connect himself with Prison Discipline.
That is the inalienable property of official personages ; and,
until Mr. Reade can show that he has so much a-year, paid
quarterly, for understanding (or not understanding) the
subject, it is none of his, and it is impossible that he can be
allowed to deal with it.
The name of Mr. Dickens is at the head of this page, and
the hand of Mr. Dickens writes this paper. He will shelter
himself under no affectation of being any one else, in having
a few words of earnest but temperate remonstrance with the
MISPRINT IN THE REVIEW 161
Edinburgh Review, before pointing out its curious misprint.
Temperate, for the honour of Literature ; temperate, because
of the great services which the Edinburgh Review has ren-
dered in its time to good literature, and good government;
temperate, in remembrance of the loving affection of Jeffrey,
the friendship of Sydney Smith, and the faithful sympathy
of both.
The License of Modern Novelists is a taking title. But
it suggests another, — the License of Modern Reviewers.
Mr. Dickens's libel on the wonderfully exact and vigorous
English government, which is always ready for any emer-
gency, and which, as everybody knows, has never shown
itself to be at all feeble at a pinch within the memory of men,
is License in a novelist. Will the Edinburgh, Review forgive
Mr. Dickens for taking the liberty to point out what is
License in a Reviewer?
'Even the catastrophe in Little Dorritt is evidently borrowed
from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which
happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient
period.'
Thus, the Reviewer. The Novelist begs to ask him whether
there is no License in his writing those words and stating
that assumption as a truth, when any man accustomed to the
critical examination of a book cannot fail, attentively turn-
ing over the pages of Little Dorrit, to observe that that
catastrophe is carefully prepared for from the very first
presentation of the old house in the story ; that when Rigaud,
the man who is crushed by the fall of the house, first enters
it (hundreds of pages before the end), he is beset by a
mysterious fear and shuddering; that the rotten and crazy
state of the house is laboriously kept before the reader, when-
ever the house is shown ; that the way to the demolition of the
man and the house together, is paved all through the book
with a painful minuteness and reiterated care of preparation,
the necessity of which (in order that the thread may be
kept in the reader's mind through nearly two years), is one
of the adverse incidents of that serial form of publication?
It may be nothing to the question that Mr. Dickens now
162 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
publicly declares, on his word of honour, that that catas-
trophe was written, was engraved on steel, was printed, had
passed through the hands of compositors, readers for the
press, and pressmen, and was in type and in proof in the
Printing House of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, before the
accident in Tottenham Court Road occurred. But, it is
much to the question that an honourable reviewer might have
easily traced this out in the internal evidence of the book
itself, before he stated, for a fact, what is utterly and en-
tirely, in every particular and respect, untrue. More ; if
the Editor of the Edinburgh Review (unbending from the
severe official duties of a blameless branch of the Circumlo-
cution Office) had happened to condescend to cast his eye
on the passage, and had referred even its mechanical proba-
bilities and improbabilities to his publishers, those experi-
enced gentlemen must have warned him that he was getting
into danger; must have told him that on a comparison of
dates, and with a reference to the number printed of Little
Dorrit, with that very incident illustrated, and to the date of
the publication of the completed book in a volume, they
hardly perceived how Mr. Dickens could have waited, with
such a desperate Micawberism, for a fall of houses in Tot-
tenham Court Road, to get him out of his difficulties, and
yet could have come up to time with the needful punctuality.
Does the Edinburgh Review make no charges at random?
Does it live in a blue and yellow glass house, and yet throw
such big stones over the roof? Will the licensed Reviewer
apologise to the licensed Novelist, for his little Circumlocution
Office? Will he 'examine the justice' of his own 'general
charges,' as well as Mr. Dickens's? Will he apply his own
words to himself, and come to the conclusion that it really is,
'a little curious to consider what qualifications a man ought
to possess, before he could with any kind of propriety hold
this language'?
The Novelist now proceeds to the Reviewer's curious mis-
print. The Reviewer, in his laudation of the great official
departments, and in his indignant denial of there being any
trace of a Circumlocution Office to be detected among them
all, begs to know, 'what does Mr. Dickens think of the whole
MISPRINT IN THE REVIEW 163
organisation of the Post-Office, and of the system of cheap
Postage?' Taking St. Martins-le-grand in tow, the wrathful
Circumlocution steamer, puffing at Mr. Dickens to crush him
with all the weight of that first-rate vessel, demands, 'to take
a single and well-known example, how does he account for
the career of Mr. Rowland Hill? A gentleman in a private
and not very conspicuous position, writes a pamphlet recom-
mending what amounted to a revolution in a most important
department of the Government. Did the Circumlocution
Office neglect him, traduce him, break his heart, and ruin his
fortune? They adopted his scheme, and gave him the lead-
ing share in carrying it out, and yet this is the government
which Mr. Dickens declares to be a sworn foe to talent, and
a systematic enemy to ingenuity.'
The curious misprint, here, is the name of Mr. Rowland
Hill. Some other and perfectly different name must have
been sent to the printer. Mr. Rowland Hill ! ! Why, if Mr.
Rowland Hill were not, in toughness, a man of a hundred
thousand; if he had not had in the struggles of his career
a steadfastness of purpose overriding all sensitiveness, and
steadily staring grim despair out of countenance, the Cir-
cumlocution Office would have made a dead man of him long
and long ago. Mr. Dickens, among his other darings, dares
to state, that the Circumlocution Office most heartily hated
Mr. Rowland Hill ; that the Circumlocution Office most char-
acteristically opposed him as long as opposition was in any
way possible ; that the Circumlocution Office would have been
most devoutly glad if it could have harried Mr. Rowland
Hill's soul out of his body, and consigned him and his
troublesome penny project to the grave together.
Mr. Rowland Hill! ! Now, see the impossibility of Mr.
Rowland Hill being the name which the Edinburgh Review
sent to the printer. It may have relied on the forbearance
of Mr. Dickens towards living gentlemen, for his being mute
on a mighty job that was jobbed in that very Post-Office
when Mr. Rowland Hill was taboo there, and it shall not
rely upon his courtesy in vain: though there be breezes on
the southern side of mid-Strand, London, in which the scent
of it is yet strong on quarter-days. But, the Edinburgh
164 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Review never can have put up Mr. Rowland Hill for the
putting down of Mr. Dickens's idle fiction of a Circumlocution
Office. The 'license* would have been too great, the absurdity
would have been too transparent, the Circumlocution Office
dictation and partisanship would have been much too mani-
fest.
'The Circumlocution Office adopted his scheme, and gave
him the leading share in carrying it out.' The words are
clearly not applicable to Mr. Rowland Hill. Does the Re-
viewer remember the history of Mr. Rowland Hill's scheme?
The Novelist does, and will state it here, exactly ; in spite of
its being one of the eternal decrees that the Reviewer, in
virtue of his license, shall know everything, and that the
Novelist, in virtue of his license, shall know nothing.
Mr. Rowland Hill published his pamphlet on the establish-
ment of one uniform penny postage, in the beginning of
the year eighteen hundred and thirty-seven. Mr. Wallace,
member for Greenock, who had long been opposed to the
then existing Post-Office system, nuved for a Committee on
the subject. Its appointment was opposed by the Govern-
ment— or, let us say, the Circumlocution Office — but was
afterwards conceded. Before that Committee, the Circum-
locution Office and Mr. Rowland Hill were perpetually in
conflict on questions of fact; and it invariably turned out.
that Mr. Rowland Hill was always right in his facts, and
that the Circumlocution Office was always wrong. Even on
so plain a point as the average number of letters at that very
time passing through the Post-Office, Mr. Rowland Hill was
right, and the Circumlocution Office was wrong.
Says the Edinburgh Review, in what it calls a 'general'
way, 'The Circumlocution Office adopted his scheme.' Did
it? Not just then, certainly; for, nothing whatever was
done, arising out of the enquiries of that Committee. But,
it happened that the Whig Government afterwards came
to be beaten on the Jamaica question, by reason of the Radi-
cals voting against them. Sir Robert Peel was commanded
to form a Government, but failed, in consequence of the
difficulties that arose (our readers will remember them) about
the Ladies of the Bedchamber. The Ladies of the Be'dcham-
MISPRINT IN THE REVIEW 165
ber brought the Whigs in again, and then the Radicals
(being always for the destruction of everything) made it
one of the conditions of their rendering their support to the
new Whig Government that the penny-postage system should
be adopted. This was two years after the appointment of
the Committee : that is to say, in eighteen hundred and thirty-
nine. The Circumlocution Office had, to that time, done
nothing towards the penny postage, but oppose, delay, con-
tradict, and show itself uniformly wrong.
'They adopted his scheme, and gave him the leading share
In carrying it out.' Of course they gave him the leading
share in carrying it out, then, at the time when they adopted
it, and took the credit and popularity of it? Not so. In
eighteen hundred and thirty-nine, Mr. Rowland Hill was ap-
pointed-— not to the Post-Office, but to the Treasury. Was
he appointed to the Treasury to carry out his own scheme?
No. He was appoined 'to advise.' In other words, to in-
struct the ignorant Circumlocution Office how to do without
him, if it by any means could. On the tenth of January,
eighteen hundred and forty, the penny-postage system was
adopted. Then, of course, the Circumlocution Office gave
Mr. Rowland Hill 'the leading share in carrying it out'?
Not exactly, but it gave him the leading share in carrying
himself out: for, in eighteen hundred and forty-two, it sum-
marily dismissed Mr. Rowland Hill altogether!
When the Circumlocution Office had come to that pass in
its patriotic course, so much admired by the Edinburgh Re-
view, of protecting and patronising Mr. Rowland Hill, whom
any child who is not a Novelist can perceive to have been its
peculiar protege, the public mind (always perverse) became
much excited on the subject. Sir Thomas Wilde moved
for another Committee. Circumlocution Office interposed.
Nothing was done. The public subscribed and presented to
Mr. Rowland Hill, Sixteen Thousand Pounds. Circumlo-
cution Office remained true to itself and its functions. Did
nothing; would do nothing. It was not until eighteen hun-
dred and forty-six, four years afterwards, that Mr. Rowland
Hill was appointed to a place in the Post-Office. Was he
appointed, even then, to the 'leading share in carrying out*
166 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
his scheme? He was permitted to creep into the Post-Office
up the back stairs, through having a place created for him.
This post of dignity and honour, this Circumlocution Office
crown, was called 'Secretary to the Post-Master General' ;
there being already a Secretary to the Post-Office, of whom
the Circumlocution Office had declared, as its reason for
dismissing Mr. Rowland Hill, that his functions and Mr.
Rowland Hill's could not be made to harmonise.
They did not harmonise. They were in perpetual discord.
Penny postage is but one reform of a number of Post-Office
reforms effected by Mr. Rowland Hill ; and these, for eight
years longer, were thwarted and opposed by the Circumlo-
cution Office, tooth and nail. It was not until eighteen
hundred and fifty-four, fourteen years after the appoint-
ment of Mr. Wallace's Committee, that Mr. Rowland Hill
(having, as was openly stated at the time, threatened to
resign and to give his reasons for doing so), was at last made
sole Secretary at the Post-Office, and the inharmonious sec-
retary (of whom no more shall be said) was otherwise dis-
posed of. It is only since that date of eighteen hundred and
fifty-four, that such reforms as the amalgamation of the
general and district posts, the division of London into ten
towns, the earlier delivery of letters all over the country, the
book and parcels post, the increase of letter-receiving houses
everywhere, and the management of the Post-Office with a
greatly increased efficiency, have been brought about by Mr.
Rowland Hill for the public benefit and the public conven-
ience.
If the Edinburgh Review could seriously want to know
'How Mr. Dickens accounts for the career of Mr. Rowland
Hill,' Mr. Dickens would account for it by his being a
Birmingham man of such imperturbable steadiness and
strength of purpose, that the Circumlocution Office, by its
utmost endeavours, very freely tried, could not weaken his
determination, sharpen his razor, or break his heart. By
his being a man in whose behalf the public gallantry was
roused, and the public spirit awakened. By his having a
project, in its nature so plainly and directly tending to the
immediate benefit of every man, woman, and child in the
WELL-AUTHENTICATED RAPPINGS 167
State, that the Circumlocution Office could not blind them,
though it could for a time cripple it. By his having thus,
from the first to the last, made his way in spite of the Cir-
cumlocution Office, and dead against it as his natural enemy.
But, the name is evidently a curious misprint and an un-
fortunate mistake. The Novelist will await the Reviewer's
correction of the press, and substitution of the right name.
Will the Edinburgh Review also take its next opportunity
of manfully expressing its regret that in too distempered a
zeal for the Circumlocution Office, it has been betrayed, as
to that Tottenham Court Road assertion, into a hasty sub-
stitution of untruth for truth ; the discredit of which, it might
have saved itself, if it had been sufficiently cool and con-
siderate to be simply just? It will, too possibly, have much
to do by that time in championing its Circumlocution Office
in new triumphs on the voyage out to India (God knows that
the Novelist has his private as well as his public reasons for
writing the foreboding with no triumphant heart!) ; but even
party occupation, the reviewer's license, or the editorial
plural, does not absolve a gentleman from a gentleman's
duty, a gentleman's restraint, and a gentleman's generosity.
Mr. Dickens will willingly do his best to 'account for' any
new case of Circumlocution Office protection that the Re-
view may make a gauntlet of. He may be trusted to do so,
he hopes, with a just respect for the Review, for himself, and
for his calling; beyond the sound, healthy, legitimate uses
and influences of which, he has no purpose to serve, and no
ambition in life to gratify.
WELL-AUTHENTICATED RAPPINGS
[FEBRUARY 20, 1858]
THE writer, who is about to record three spiritual experi-
ences of his own in the present truthful article, deems it
essential to state that, down to the time of his being favoured
therewith, he had not been a believer in rappings, or tippings.
His vulgar notions of the spiritual world, represented its
168 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
inhabitants as probably advanced, even beyond the intellectual
supremacy of Peckham or New York ; and it seemed to him,
considering the large amount of ignorance, presumption, and
folly with which this earth is blessed, so very unnecessary to
call in immaterial Beings to gratify mankind with bad spell-
ing and worse nonsense, that the presumption was strongly
against those respected films taking the trouble to come here,
for no better purpose than to make supererogatory idiots of
themselves.
This was the writer's gross and fleshy state of mind at so
late a period as the twenty-sixth of December last. On that
memorable morning, at about two hours after daylight, —
that is to say, at twenty minutes before ten by the writer's
watch, which stood on a table at his bedside, and which can
be seen at the publishing-office, and identified as a demi-
chronometer made by Bautte of Geneva, and numbered
67,709 — on that memorable morning, at about two hours
after daylight, the writer, starting up in bed with his hand
to his forehead, distinctly felt seventeen heavy throbs or
beats in that region. They were accompanied by a feeling
of pain in the locality, and by a general sensation not unlike
that which is usually attendant on biliousness. Yielding to
a sudden impulse, the writer asked:
'What is this?'
The answer immediately returned (in throbs or beats upon
the forehead) was, 'Yesterday.'
The writer then demanded, being as yet but imperfectly
awake :
'What was yesterday?'
Answer: 'Christmas Day.'
The writer, being now quite come to himself, inquired,
'Who is the Medium in this case?'
Answer : 'Clarkins.'
Question: 'Mrs. Clarkins, or Mr. Clarkins?'
Answer: 'Both.'
Question : 'By Mr., do you mean Old Clarkins, or Young
Clarkins?'
Answer: 'Both.'
Now, the writer had dined with his friend Clarkins (who
WELL-AUTHENTICATED RAPPINGS 169
can be appealed to, at the State-Paper Office) on the previous
day, and spirits had actually been discussed at that dinner,
under various aspects. It was in the writer's remembrance,
also, that both Clarkins Senior and Clarkins Junior had
been very active in such discussion, and had rather pressed
it on the company. Mrs. Clarkins too had joined in it with
animation, and had observed, in a joyous if not an exuber-
ant tone, that it was 'only once a year.'
Convinced by these tokens that the rapping was of spir-
itual origin, the writer proceeded as follows:
'Who are you?'
The rapping on the forehead was resumed, but in a most
incoherent manner. It was for some time impossible to make
sense of it. After a pause, the writer (holding his head)
repeated the inquiry in a solemn voice, accompanied with a
groan:
'Who ARE you?'
Incoherent rappings were still the response.
The writer then asked, solemnly as before, and with an-
other groan:
'What is your name?'
The reply was conveyed in a sound exactly resembling a
loud hiccough. It afterwards appeared that this spiritual
voice was distinctly heard by Alexander Pumpion, the writer's
footboy (seventh son of Widow Pumpion, mangier), in an
adjoining chamber.
Question: 'Your name cannot be Hiccough? Hiccough
is not a proper name?'
No answer being returned, the writer said: 'I solemnly
charge you, by our joint knowledge of Clarkins the Medium
— of Clarkins Senior, Clarkins Junior, and Clarkins Mrs. —
to reveal your name !'
The reply rapped out with extreme unwillingness, was,
'Sloe-Juice, Logwood, Blackberry.'
This appeared to the writer sufficiently like a parody on
Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-Seed, in the Midsummer Night's
Dream, to justify the retort:
'That is not your name?'
The rapping spirit admitted, 'No.'
170 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
'Then what do they generally call you?'
A pause.
'I ask you, what do they generally call you?'
The spirit, evidently under coercion, responded, in a most
solemn manner, 'Port!'
This awful communication caused the writer to lie pros-
trate, on the verge of insensibility, for a quarter of an hour :
during which the rappings were continued with violence, and
a host of spiritual appearances passed before his eyes, of a
black hue, and greatly resembling tadpoles endowed with the
power of occasionally spinning themselves out into musical
notes as they swam down into space. After contemplating
a vast Legion of these appearances, the writer demanded of
the rapping spirit:
'How am I to present you to myself? What, upon the
whole, is most like you?'
The terrific reply was, 'Blacking.'
As soon as the writer could command his emotion, which
was not very great, he inquired:
'Had I better take something?'
Answer : 'Yes.'
Question: 'Can I write for something?'
Answer : 'Yes.'
A pencil and a slip of paper which were on the table at the
bed-side immediately bounded into the writer's hand, and he
found himself forced to write ( in a curiously unsteady charac-
ter and all downhill, whereas his own writing is remarkably
plain and straight) the following spiritual note.
'Mr. C. D. S. Pooney presents his compliments to Messrs.
Bell and Company, Pharmaceutical Chemists, Oxford Street,
opposite to Portland Street, and begs them to have the good-
ness to send him by Bearer a five-grain genuine blue pill and
a genuine black draught of corresponding power.'
But, before entrusting this document to Alexander Pum-
pion (who unfortunately lost it on his return, if he did not
even lay himself open to. the suspicion of having wilfully in-
serted it into one of the holes of a perambulating chestnut-
roaster, to see how it would flare), the writer resolved to test
WELL-AUTHENTICATED RAPPINGS 171
the rapping spirit with one conclusive question. He there-
fore asked, in a slow and impressive voice:
'Will these remedies make my stomach ache?'
It is impossible to describe the prophetic confidence of the
reply, 'YES.' The assurance was fully borne out by the re-
sult, as the writer will long remember ; and after this experi-
ence it were needless to observe that he could no longer doubt.
The next communication of a deeply interesting character
with which the writer was favoured, occurred on one of the
leading lines of railway. The circumstances under which the
revelation was made to him — on the second day of January
in the present year — were these: He had recovered from the
effects of the previous remarkable visitation, and had again
been partaking of the compliments of the season. The pre-
ceding day had been passed in hilarity. He was on his way
to a celebrated town, a well-known commercial emporium
where he had business to transact, and had lunched in a some-
what greater hurry than is usual on railways, in consequence
of the train being behind time. His lunch had been very re-
luctantly administered to him by a young lady behind a coun-
ter. She had been much occupied at the time with the ar-
rangement of her hair and dress, and her expressive counte-
nance had denoted disdain. It will be seen that this young
lady proved to be a powerful Medium.
The writer had returned to the first-class carriage in which
he chanced to be travelling alone, the train had resumed its
motion, he had fallen into a doze, and the unimpeachable
watch already mentioned recorded forty-five minutes to have
elapsed since his interview with the Medium, when he was
aroused by a very singular musical instrument. This instru-
ment, he found to his admiration not unmixed with alarm, was
performing in his inside. Its tones were of a low and rip-
pling character, difficult to describe ; but, if such a compari-
son may be admitted, resembling a melodious heartburn. Be
this as it may, they suggested that humble sensation to the
writer.
Concurrently with his becoming aware of the phenomenon
in question, the writer perceived that his attention was being
172 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
solicited by a hurried succession of angry raps in the stom-
ach, and a pressure on the chest. A sceptic no more, he im-
mediately communed with the spirit. The dialogue was as
follows :
Question: 'Do I know your name?'
Answer: '/ should think so!'
Question : 'Does it begin with a P ?'
Answer (second time) : '/ should think so!'
Question : 'Have you two names, and does each begin with
a P?'
Answer (third time): '/ should think so!'
Question: 'I charge you to lay aside this levity, and in-
form me what you are called.'
The spirit, after reflecting for a few seconds, spelt out
P. O. R. K. The musical instrument then performed a short
and fragmentary strain. The spirit then recommenced, and
spelt out the word 'P. I. E.'
Now, this precise article of pastry, this particular viand
or comestible, actually had formed — let the scoffer know —
the staple of the writer's lunch, and actually had been handed
to him by the young lady whom he now knew to be a power-
ful Medium! Highly gratified by the conviction thus forced
upon his mind that the knowledge with which he conversed
was not of this world, the writer pursued the dialogue.
Question: 'They call you Pork Pie?'
Answer : 'Yes.'
Question (which the writer timidly put, after struggling
with some natural reluctance) : 'Are you, in fact, Pork Pie?'
Answer : 'Yes.'
It were vain to attempt a description of the mental com-
fort and relief which the writer derived from this important
answer. He proceeded:
Question : 'Let us understand each other. A part of you
is Pork, and a part of you is Pie?'
Answer: 'Exactly so.'
Question: 'What is your Pie-part made of?'
Answer: 'Lard.' Then came a sorrowful strain from the
musical instrument. Then the word 'Dripping.'
WELL-AUTHEXTICATED RAPPINGS 173
Question: 'How am I to present you to my mind? What
are you most like?'
Answer ( very quickly ) : 'Lead.'
A sense of despondency overcame the writer at this point.
When he had in some measure conquered it, he resumed:
Question: 'Your other nature is a Porky nature. What
has that nature been chiefly sustained upon?'
Answer (in a sprightly manner) : 'Pork, to be sure !'
Question: 'Not so. Pork is not fed upon Pork?'
Answer: 'Isn't it, though!'
A strange internal feeling, resembling a flight of pigeons,
seized upon the writer. He then became illuminated in a sur-
prising manner, and said:
'Do I understand you to hint that the human race, incau-
tiously attacking the indigestible fortresses called by your
name, and not having time to storm them, owing to the great
solidity of their almost impregnable walls, are in the habit of
leaving much of their contents in the hands of the Mediums,
who with such pig nourish the pigs of the future pies?'
Answer : 'That 's it !'
Question : 'Then to paraphrase the words of our immortal
bard—'
Answer (interrupting) :
'The same pork in its time, makes many pies,
Its least being seven pasties.'
The writer's emotion was profound. But, again desirous
still further to try the Spirit, and to ascertain whether, in
the poetic phraseology of the advanced seers of the United
States, it hailed from one of the inner and more elevated cir-
cles, he tested its knowledge with the following
Question : 'In the wild harmony of the musical instrument
within me, of which I am again conscious, what other sub-
stances are there airs of, besides those you have mentioned?'
Answer: 'Cape. Gamboge. Camomile. Treacle. Spir-
its of wine. Distilled Potatoes.'
Question: 'Nothing else?'
Answer: 'Nothing worth mentioning.'
174 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Let the scorner tremble and do homage ; let the feeble
sceptic blush ! The writer at his lunch had demanded of the
powerful Medium, a glass of Sherry, and likewise a small
glass of Brandy. Who can doubt that the articles of com-
merce indicated by the Spirit were supplied to him from that
source under those two names?
One other instance may suffice to prove that experiences of
the foregoing nature are no longer to be questioned, and that
it ought to be made capital to attempt to explain them away.
It is an exquisite case of Tipping.
The writer's Destiny had appointed him to entertain a hope-
less affection for Miss L. B., of Bungay, in the county of
Suffolk. Miss L. B. had not, at the period of the occurrence
of the Tipping, openly rejected the writer's offer of his hand
and heart ; but it has since seemed probable that she had been
withheld from doing so, by filial fear of her father, Mr. B.,
who was favourable to the writer's pretensions. Now, mark
the Tipping. A young man, obnoxious to all well-consti-
tuted minds (since married to Miss L. B.), was visiting at
the house. Young B. was also home from school. The
writer was present. The family party were assembled about
a round table. It was the spiritual time of twilight in the
month of July. Objects could not be discerned with any de-
gree of distinctness. Suddenly, Mr. B., whose senses had
been lulled to repose, infused terror into all our breasts, by
uttering a passionate roar or ejaculation. His words (his
education was neglected in his youth) were exactly these:
'Damme, here 's somebody a shoving of a letter into my hand,
under my own mahogany !' Consternation seized the assem-
bled group. Mrs. B. augmented the prevalent dismay by
declaring that somebody had been softly treading on her
toes, at intervals, for half an hour. Greater consternation
seized the assembled group. Mr. B. called for lights. Now,
mark the Tipping. Young B. cried (I quote his expressions
accurately), 'It's the spirits, father! They've been at it
with me this last fortnight.' Mr. B. demanded with irasci-
bility, 'What do you mean, sir? What have they been at?'
Young B. replied, 'Wanting to make a regular Post-office of
me, father. They 're always handing impalpable letters to
WELL-AUTHENTICATED RAPPINGS 175
me, father. A letter must have come creeping round to you
by mistake. I must be a Medium, father. O here 's a go !'
cried young B. 'If I ain't a jolly Medium !' The boy now
became violently convulsed, sputtering exceedingly, and jerk-
ing out his legs and arms in a manner calculated to cause me
(and which did cause me) serious inconvenience; for, I was
supporting his respected mother within range of his boots,
and he conducted himself like a telegraph before the inven-
tion of the electric one. All this time Mr. B. was looking
about under the table for the letter, while the obnoxious
young man, since married to Miss L. B., protected that young
lady in an obnoxious manner. 'O here 's a go !' Young B.
continued to cry without intermission, 'If I an't a jolly
Medium, father ! Here 's a go ! There '11 be a Tipping
presently, father. Look out for the table!' Now mark the
Tipping. The table tipped so violently as to strike Mr. B.
a good half-dozen times on his bald head while he was look-
ing under it; which caused Mr. B. to come out with great
agility, and rub it with much tenderness (I refer to his head),
and to imprecate it with much violence (I refer to the table).
I observed that the tipping of the table was uniformly in the
direction of the magnetic current ; that is to say, from south
to north, or from young B. to Mr. B. I should have made
some further observations on this deeply interesting point, but
that the table suddenly revolved, and tipped over on myself,
bearing me to the ground with a force increased by the mo-
mentum imparted to it by young B., who came over with it
in a state of mental exaltation, and could not be displaced for
some time. In the interval, I was aware of being crushed by
his weight and the table's, and also of his constantly calling
out to his sister and the obnoxious young man, that he fore-
saw there would be another Tipping presently.
None such, however, took place. He recovered after tak-
ing a short walk with them in the dark, and no worse effects
of the very beautiful experience with which we had been fa-
voured, were perceptible in him during the rest of the even-
ing, than a slight tendency to hysterical laughter, and a no-
ticeable attraction (I might almost term it fascination) of his
left hand, in the direction of his heart or waistcoat-pocket
176 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Was this, or was it not a case of Tipping? Will the scep-
tic and the scoffer reply?
AN IDEA OF MINE
[MARCH 13, 1858]
EMERGING, the other day, into the open street from an ex-
hibition of pictures at the West End of London, I was much
impressed by the contrast between the polite bearing of the
Fine Arts, and the rudeness of real life. Inside the gallery,
all the people in the pictures had pointedly referred to me
in every cock of their highly feathered hats, in every wrinkle
of their highly slashed doublets, in every stride and straddle
of their highly muscular legs. Outside, I did not observe
that I exercised any influence on the crowd who were pursuing
their business or their pleasure ; or that those insensible per-
sons at all altered the expression of their countenances for
my sake. Inside, nothing could be done without me. Were
a pair of eyes in question, they must smirk at me ; were a
pair of spurs in question, they must glint at me ; were a pair
of boots in question, they must stretch themselves out on
forms and benches to captivate me. Whereas, it appeared
to me, that the eyes and the spurs and the boots that were
outside, all had more or less of their own to do, and did it ;
thereby reducing me to the station of quite an unimportant
personage. I had occasion to make the same remark in refer-
ence to the Passions. Nothing could exceed the good-breed-
ing with which, inside the gallery, they had entreated me not
to disturb myself on their account, and had begged me to
observe that they were what the children call, 'only in fun.'
Outside, on the other hand, they were quite obstreperous, and
no more cared to preserve a good understanding with me than
if I had been one of the sparrows in the gutter. A similar
barbarous tendency to reality, to change and movement, and
to the knowledge of the Present as a something of interest
sprung out of the Past and melting into the Future, was to
be noted on every external object: insomuch that the passing
AN IDEA OF MINE 177
from the inside of the gallery to the outside was like the
transition from Madame Tussaud's waxwork, or a tawdry
fancy ball in the Sleeping Beauty's palace during the hundred
years of enchantment, to a windy mountain or the rolling sea.
I understood now, what I had never understood before, why
there were two sentries at the exhibition-door. These are not
to be regarded as mere privates in the Foot Guards, but as
allegorical personages, stationed there with gun and bayonet
to keep out Purpose, and to mount guard over the lassitude
of the Fine Arts, laid up in the lavender of other ages.
I was so charmed by these discoveries, and particularly the
last, that I stepped into my club (the Associated Bores), with
the idea of writing an essay, to be entitled The Praise of
Painting. But, as I am of a discriminatory turn, even in my
admiration, I meditated in its stead a little project of. re-
form, which I proceed to submit to the Royal Academy
of Arts — and of whose co-operation I have no doubt — and to
the public.
Devoted as I am to the pictures which it is the pride and
privilege of the present age to produce in this land of the
free and refuge of the slave, I cannot disguise from myself
the fact that I know all the Models. I cannot shut my eyes
to the gloomy truth, that my fellow-countrymen and country-
women are but too well acquainted by sight with every mem-
ber of that limited profession which sits to painters at so much
an hour. I cannot be deaf to the whisper of my conscience
that we have had enough of them. I am unable to silence the
still small voice which tells me that I am tired to death of that
young man with the large chest, and that I would thankfully
accept a less symmetrical young man with a smaller chest,
or even with a chest in which the stethoscope might detect a
weakness. Immaculate as that other young man's legs are,
I am sick of his legs. A novelty, even though it were bandy,
would be a sweet and soothing relief to me.
My feelings are, I say, the feelings of thousands who suf-
fer with me under the oppression of this nightmare of Mod-
els, and I therefore reckon with certainty on the general sup-
port of my project for curing the evil. My project is as
follows :
178 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
1. That the young man with the large chest be promptly
taken into custody, and confined in the Tower.
2. That the young man with the immaculate legs be
promptly taken into custody, and confined in Greenwich Hos-
pital; and that his legs be there immediately amputated (un-
der chloroform), and decently buried within the precincts of
the building.
3. That the young woman with the long eyelashes be sent
to the Magdalen until further orders.
4. That every other Model be immediately seized, veiled,
and placed in' solitary confinement.
5. That the fancy-dress establishment of the Messrs. Na-
than in Titchbourne Street, Haymarket, be razed to the
ground, and the stock-in-trade seized ; and further, that all
slashed dresses of the period of Charles the Second, all buff
jerkins of the Commonwealth, and all large boots of whatso-
ever description, found in such stock, be publicly burnt, as old
and incorrigible offenders.
6. That the premises of the Messrs. Pratt in Bond Street,
as being in the occupation of the leaders of the Still-life
Model Department, be rigidly searched, and that all the old
curiosity shops in Wardour Street and elsewhere be likewise
rigidly searched, and that all offensively notorious property
found therein be brought away. That is to say: all steel-
caps and armour of whatsoever description, all large spurs
and spur-leathers, all bossy tankards, all knobby drinking
glasses, all ancient bottles and jugs, all high-backed chairs,
all twisted-legged tables, all carpets, covers, and hangings,
all remarkable swords and daggers, all strangely bound old
books, and all spinning wheels. (The last-named to be
broken on the spot.)
It may be objected by the scrupulous, that the loss of prop-
erty thus caused would fall heavily on individuals, and would
be a greater punishment than could be justified, even by the
immense provocation the public has received. My answer is,
that my project is based on principles of justice, and that I
therefore propose to compensate these persons by paying the
fair purchase-price of all the articles seized.
For this purpose (and for another to be presently men-
AN IDEA OF M7.NE 179
tioned), I propose that the government be empowered to raise
by the issue of exchequer bills, a sum not exceeding three
millions sterling. Inasmuch as it would be necessary to pur-
chase of Messrs. Hunt and Roskell, goldsmiths and jewellers
of New Bond Street, and likewise of Mr. Hancock, goldsmith
and jeweller of the same place, various highly-exasperating
tall cups and covers wrought in precious metals, which daily
find their way into pictures, to the persecution, terror, and
exhaustion of the public, my calculation is, that two millions
of the three would be sunk in the payments indispensable to
the public relief.
The remaining million to be devoted to the two remaining
objects now to be described.
Firstly, the construction of a large building (if no edifice
sufficiently inconvenient and hideous to serve a national pur-
pose be already in existence), in which the seized property
shall be deposited in strict seclusion for ever. As the public,
after its long and terrible experience of the contents of this
dismal storehouse, will naturally shun it, and as all good par-
ents may confidently be expected to teach their children in
awestricken whispers to avoid it, it would be superfluous to
take precautions against the intrusion of any casual visitors.
But, it will be necessary (so touching is the constancy and
so enthralling the affection with which painters cling to
Models), to make it capital for any professor of the art of
painting to be found in the Institution on any pretence what-
ever; and to render it incumbent on the judges of the land,
receiving proof of such offence according to the usual laws
of evidence, to sentence the offender to death, without hope
of mercy.
The east and west sides of this building to be fitted up,
each with its own sleeping rooms, domestic offices, dining-
hall, and chapel. The east side to be called The Side of the
Male Models; the west side to be called The Side of the Fe-
male Models. Every preparation being completed for the
reception of these unhappy persons, hither would be brought :
from the Tower, the young man with the large chest; from
Greenwich Hospital, the young man without the immacu-
late legs ; from the Magdalen, the young woman with the long
180 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
eyelashes. Hither too, would be brought, all in close custody
and heavily veiled, the whole offending family of live Models.
Hither, a procession of hearses would convey them in the dead
of night ; the first hearse containing the aggravating patri-
arch with the white beard, and the pious grandmother with
the veinous hands ; the last, containing the innocent but mis-
guided child who has long been accustomed to sit on a cruelly
knotty bench, and blow bubbles from a pipe. From this
place of seclusion and expiation, they should never more be
permitted to come forth. And adapting an idea from the
eloquent pamphlet of Mr. Commissioner Phillips on capital
punishment, I would have a gorgeous flag perpetually waving
from the apex of the roof, on which should be inscribed, in
mediaeval characters, THE GRAVE OF THE MODELS.
But, still respecting the eternal principles of justice, I
would not confiscate the money-earning opportunities of the
socially deceased. This brings me to the last object to which
the residue of the capital of three millions should be appro-
priated. Assuming, say the young man with the large chest,
to have been able to earn by that chest two shillings an hour
(I take that to be high, but his chest is very large), for six
hours a day during six months of the year, that young man's
gains, in round numbers, would amount to ninety pounds
per annum. I would pay that young man that income, and,
though civilly dead, he should retain the power of disposing
of his property by will. Neither would I amputate the legs
of that other young man, without allowing him, besides, a
pension for their loss in the public service. The rights of the
young woman with the eyelashes would be similarly respected.
No Model would suffer, except in liberty, by the incalculable
addition to the stock of general comfort and happiness.
Over and above these great advantages, I would concede to
the Models the right of encasing themselves in all the armour,
wearing all the fancy dresses, lolling in all the high-backed
chairs, putting on the boots of all periods and striding them
under, over, or upon, all the twisted-legged tables, and pre-
tending to drink out of all the knobby glasses and bossy
tankards, in the collection. As they have seldom done any-
thing else, and, happily for themselves, have seldom been
LEAVE YOUR UMBRELLA 181
used to do this to any purpose but the display of themselves
and the property, I conceive that they would hardly discern
a difference between their being under the proposed restraint
and being still at large.
This is my project. Whether the withdrawal of the Mod-
els would reduce our men of genius, who paint pictures, to
the shameful necessity of wresting their great art to the tell-
ing of stories and conveying of ideas, is a question upon
which I do not feel called to enter. To close with quite an-
other head of remark, I will observe that I may be told that
the Act of Parliament necessary for carrying out my pur-
pose, is a sweeping one, and might be opposed. I have con-
sidered that, too, and have discovered the remedy. It is
(which can be easily done), but to get some continental sov-
.ereign to demand it, on a threat of invasion, fire, sword, and
extermination ; and a spirited Minister will do his utmost to
pass it with the greatest alacrity.
PLEASE TO LEAVE YOUR UMBRELLA
[MAY 1, 1858]
I MADE a visit the other day to the Palace at Hampton Court.
I may have had my little reason for being in the best of hu-
mours with the Palace at Hampton Court ; but that little rea-
son is neither here (ah! I wish it were here!) nor there.
In the readiest of moods for complying with any civil re-
quest, I was met, in the entrance-hall of the public apartments
at Hampton Court, by the most obliging of policemen, who
requested me to leave my umbrella in his custody at the foot
of the stairs. 'Most willingly,' said I, 'for my umbrella is
very wet.' So the policeman hung it on a rack, to drip on
the stone floor with the sound of an irregular clock, and gave
me a card of authority to reclaim it when I should come out
again. Then, I went prosperously through the long suites
of deserted rooms, now looking at the pictures, and now
leaning over the broad old window-seats and looking down
into the rainy old gardens, with their formal gravel walks,
182 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
clipped trees, and trim turf banks — gardens with court-suits
on. There was only one other visitor (in very melancholy
boots ) at Hampton Court that blessed day : who soon went
his long grave way, alternately dark in the piers and light in
the windows, and was seen no more.
'I wonder,' said I, in the manner of the Sentimental Jour-
neyer, 'I wonder, Yorick, whether, with this little reason in
my bosom, I should ever want to get out of these same in-
terminable suites of rooms, and return to noise and bustle ! It
seems to me that I could stay here very well until the grisly
phantom on the pale horse came at a gallop up the staircase,
seeking me. My little reason should make of these queer
dingy closet-rooms, these little corner chimney-pieces tier
above tier, this old blue china of squat shapes, these dreary
old state bedsteads with attenuated posts, nay, dear Yorick,'
said I, stretching forth my hand towards a stagnant pool of
blacking in a frame, 'should make, even of these very works
of art, an encompassing universe of beauty and happiness.
The fountain in the staid red and white courtyard without
(for we had turned that angle of the building), would never
fall too monotonously on my ear, the four chilled sparrows
now fluttering on the brink of its basin would never chirp a
wish for change of weather, no bargeman on the rain-speckled
river ; no wayfarer rain-belated under the leafless trees in
the park, would ever come into my fancy as examining in
despair those swollen clouds, and vainly peering for a ray of
sunshine. I and my little reason, Yorick, would keep house
here, all our lives, in perfect contentment; and when we died,
our ghosts should make of this dull Palace the first building
ever haunted happily!'
I had got thus far in my adaptation of the Sentimental
Journey when I was recalled to my senses by the visible pres-
ence of the Blacking which I just now mentioned. 'Good
Heaven !' I cried, with a start ; 'now I think of it, what a num-
ber of articles that policeman below-stairs required me to leave
with him !'
'Only an umbrella. He said no more than, Please to leave
your umbrella.'
'Faith, Yorick,' I returned, 'he insisted on my putting so
LEAVE YOUR UMBRELLA 183
much valuable property into my umbrella, and leaving it all
at the foot of the stairs before I entered on the contemplation
of many of these pictures, that I tremble to think of the ex-
tent to which I have been despoiled. That policeman de-
manded of me, for the time being, all the best bumps in my
head. Form, colour, size, proportion, distance, individuality,
the true perception of every object on the face of the earth
or the face of the Heavens, he insisted on my leaving at the
foot of the stairs, before I could confide in the catalogue.
And now I find the moon to be really made of green cheese;
the sun to be a yellow wafer or a little round blister ; the deep
wild sea to be a shallow series of slate-coloured festoons
turned upside down; the human face Divine to be a smear;
the whole material and immaterial universe to be sticky with
treacle and polished up with blacking. Conceive what I
must be, through all the rest of my life, if the policeman
should make off with my umbrella and never restore it!'
Filled with the terrors of this idea, I retraced my steps to
the top of the stairs, and looked over the hand-rail for my
precious property. It was still keeping time on the stone
pavement like an irregular clock, and the policeman (evidently
possessed by no dishonest spirit) was reading a newspaper.
Calmed and composed, I resumed my musing way through the
many rooms.
Please to leave your umbrella. Of all the Powers that get
your umbrella from you, Taste is the most encroaching and
insatiate. Please to put into your umbrella, to be deposited
in the hall until you come out again, all your powers of com-
parison, all your experience, all your individual opinions.
Please to accept with this ticket for your umbrella the indi
vidual opinions of some other personage whose name is Some-
body, or Nobody, or Anybody, and to swallow the same with-
out a word of demur. Be so good as to leave your eyes with
your umbrellas, gentlemen, and to deliver up your private
judgment with your walking-sticks. Apply this ointment,
compounded by the learned Dervish, and you shall see no end
of camels going with the greatest ease through needles' eyes.
Leave your umbrellafull of property which is not by any
means to be poked at this collection, with the police, and you
184 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
shall acknowledge, whether you will or no, this hideous porce-
lain-ware to be beautiful, these wearisomely stiff and unimag-
inative forms to be graceful, these coarse daubs to be master-
pieces. Leave your umbrella and take up your gentility.
Taste proclaims to you what is the genteel thing; receive it
and be genteel ! Think no more of your umbrellas — be they
the care of the Police of Scotland Yard ! Think no more for
yourselves — be you the care of the Police of Taste !
I protest that the very Tax-gatherer does not demand so
much of me as the Powers who demand my umbrella. The
Tax-gatherer will not allow men to wear hair-powder unmo-
lested; but the Umbrella-gatherer will not allow me to wear
my head. The Tax-gatherer takes toll of my spade ; but the
Umbrella-gatherer will not permit me to call my spade, a
spade. Longinus, Aristotle, Doctor Waagen, and the Mu-
sical Glasses, Parliamentary Commissions, the Lord-Knows-
Who, Marlborough House, and the Brompton Boilers, have
declared my spade to be a mop-stick. And I must please to
give up my umbrella, and believe in the mop-stick.
Again. The moral distinctions, and the many remem-
brances, and balances of This and That, which I am required
by other authorities to put into my so-often demanded um-
brella and to leave in the lobby, are as numerous as the
Barnacle family. It was but a sessions or two ago, that I
went to the gallery of the Old Bailey, to hear a trial. Was
my umbrella all that I was called upon to leave behind me,
previous to taking my seat? Certainly not. I was requested
to put so many things into it that it became, though of itself
a neat umbrella, more bulgy than Mrs. Gamp's. I found it
insisted upon, that I should cram into this unfortunate arti-
cle all the weighty comparisons I had ever made in my life
between the guilt of laying hands upon a pound of scrag of
mutton, and upon hundreds of thousands of pounds of sterl-
ing money. I found it insisted upon, that I should leave with
my umbrella before I went into Court, any suspicions I had
about me (and I happened to have a good many), that dis-
tortion and perversion of the truth, plainly for the purpose
of so much gain, and for the enhancement of a professional
reputation, were to be observed there, outside the dock and
LEAVE YOUR UMBRELLA 185
beyond the prisoner. I found myself required to take a
ticket, conventionally used in that place, in exchange for my
natural perception of many painfully ludicrous things that
should have become obsolete long ago. Not that I complain
of this particular demand at the door; for otherwise how
could I have borne the fearful absurdity of the Judge being
unable to discharge the last awful duty of his office without
putting on a strange little comical hat, only used for the
dismissal of a blood-stained soul into eternity ? Or how could
I have withheld myself from bursting out into a fit of laugh-
ter, which would have been contempt of court, when the same
exalted functionary and two virtuous Counsel (I never in my
life had the pleasure of hearing two gentlemen talk so much
virtue) were grimly pleasant on the dressing-up in woollen
wigs of certain Negro Singers whose place of entertainment
had been innocently the scene of a manslaughter. While
the exalted functionary himself, and the two virtuous counsel
themselves, were at that very moment dressed up in woolly
wigs, to the full as false and ridiculous as any theatrical wigs
in the world, only they were not of the negro colour!
But, when I went to the Strangers' Gallery of the House
of Commons, I had a greater load to leave with my umbrella
than Christian had to lay down in the Pilgrim's Progress.
The difference between Black and White, which is really a
very large one and enough to burst any Umbrella, was the
first thing I had to force into mine. And it was well for me
that this was insisted on by the Police, or how could I have
escaped the Serjeant-at-Arms, when the very same Member
who on the last occasion of my going to the very same place
I had with my own ears heard announce with the profoundest
emotion that he came down to that house expressly to lay
his hand upon his heart and declare that Black was White and
there was no such thing as Black, now announced with the
profoundest emotion that he came down to that house ex-
pressly to lay his hand upon his heart and declare that White
was Black and there was no such thing as White? If you
have such an article about you (said the Umbrella-taker to
me in effect) as the distinction between very ill-constructed
common places, and sound patriotic facts, you are requested
186 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
to leave it at the door here. — By all means, said I. — You have
there a Noun of Multitude or signifying many, called The
Country ; please to put that too, in your Umbrella. — Will-
ingly, said I. — Your belief that public opinion is not the
lobby of this place and the bores of the clubs, will be much
in your way, and everybody else's hereabouts ; please to leave
that likewise. — You are welcome to it, said I. — But I am
bound to admit that, thus denuded, I passed quite a pleasant
evening; which I am certain I could not have done, if I had
been allowed to take my Umbrella and its cumbrous contents
in with me.
Please to leave your Umbrella. I have gone into churches
where I have been required to leave my Umbrella in a sham
mediaeval porch, with hundreds of eventful years of History
squeezed in among its ribs. I have gone into public assem-
blages of great pretensions — even into assemblages gathered
together under the most sacred of names — and my Umbrella,
filled to the handle with my sense of Christian fairness and
moderation, has been taken from me at the door- All through
life, according to my personal experience, I must please to
leave my Umbrella, or I can't go in.
I had reached this point and was about to apostrophise
Yorick once more, when a civil voice requested me, in obliging
tones, to 'claim my Umbrella.' I might have done that, with-
out a ticket, as there was no other on the rack in the hall at
Hampton Court Palace, whither I had now worked my way
round by another course, without knowing it. However, I
gave back my ticket, and got back my Umbrella, and then
I and my little reason went dreaming away under its shelter
through the fast-falling rain, which had a sound in it that
day like the rustle of the coming summer.
NEW YEAR'S DAY 187
NEW YEAR'S DAY
[JANUARY 1, 1859]
WHEN I was a little animal revolting to the sense of sight
(for I date from the period when small boys had a dreadful
high-shouldered sleeved strait-waistcoat put upon them by
their keepers, over which their dreadful little trousers were
buttoned tight, so that they roamed about disconsolate, with
their hands in their pockets, like dreadful little pairs of tongs
that were vainly looking for the rest of the fire-irons ) ; when I
was this object of just contempt and horror to all well-consti-
tuted minds, and when, according to the best of my remem-
brance and self-examination in the past, even my small shirt
was an airy superstition which had no sleeves to it and stopped
short at my chest ; when I was this exceedingly uncomfortable
and disreputable father of my present self, I remember to
have been taken, upon a New Year's Day, to the Bazaar in
Soho Square, London, to have a present brought for me. A
distinct impression yet lingers in my soul that a grim and un-
sympathetic old personage of the female gender, flavoured
with musty dry lavender, dressed in black crape, and wearing
a pocket in which something clinked at my ear as we went
along, conducted me on this occasion to the World of Toys.
I remember to have been incidentally escorted a little way
down some conveniently retired street diverging from Oxford
Street, for the purpose of being shaken ; and nothing has ever
slaked the burning thirst for vengeance awakened in me by
this female's manner of insisting upon wiping my nose her-
self (I had a cold and a pocket-handkerchief), on the screw
principle- For many years I was unable to excogitate the
reason why she should have undertaken to make me a pres-
ent. In the exercise of a matured judgment, I have now no
doubt that she had done something bad in her youth, and
that she took me out as an act of expiation.
Nearly lifted off my legs by this adamantine woman's
grasp of my glove (another fearful invention of those dark
ages — a muffler, and fastened at the wrist like a handcuff),
188 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
I was haled through the Bazaar. My tender imagination
(or conscience) represented certain small apartments in
Corners, resembling wooden cages, wherein I have since seen
reason to suppose that ladies' collars and the like are tried
on, as being, either dark places of confinement for refrac-
tory youth, or dens in which the lions were kept who fattened
on boys who said they didn't care. Suffering tremendous
terrors from the vicinity of these avenging mysteries, I was
put before an expanse of toys, apparently about a hundred
and twenty acres in extent, and was asked what I would have
to the value of half-a-crown? Having first selected every
object at half-a-guinea, and then staked all the aspirations
of my nature on every object at five shillings, I hit, as a last
resource, upon a Harlequin's Wand — painted particoloured,
like Harlequin himself.
Although of a highly hopeful and imaginative tempera-
ment, I had no fond belief that the possession of this talisman
would enable me to change Mrs. Pipchin at my side into any-
thing agreeable. When I tried the effect of the wand upon
her, behind her bonnet, it was rather as a desperate experiment
founded on the conviction that she could change into nothing
\vorse, than with any latent hope that she would change
into something better. Howbeit, I clung to the delusion that
when I got home I should do something magical with this
wand ; and I did not resign all hope of it until I had, by many
trials, proved the wand's total incapacity. It had no effect
on the staring obstinacy of a rocking-horse; it produced no
live Clown out of the hot beefsteak-pie at dinner; it could
not even influence the minds of my honoured parents to the
extent of suggesting the decency and propriety of their giv-
ing me an invitation to sit up to supper.
The failure of this wand is my first very memorable as-
sociation with a New Year's Day. Other wands have failed
me since, but the Day itself has become their substitute, and
is always potent. It is the best Harlequin's Wand I have
ever had. It has wrought strange transformations — no more
of them — its power in reproducing the Past is admirable.
Nothing ever goes wrong with that trick. I throw up and
catch my little wand of New Year's Day, beat the dust of
NEW YEAR'S DAY
years from the ground at my feet with it, twinkle it a little,
and Time reverses his hour-glass, and flies back, much fastei
than he ever flew forward.
New Year's Day. What Party can that have been, and
what New Year's Day can that have been, which first rooted
the phrase, 'A New Year's Day Party,' in my mind? So far
back do my recollections of childhood extend, that I have a
vivid remembrance of the sensation of being carried down-
stairs in a woman's arms, and holding tight to her, in the
terror of seeing th« steep perspective below. Hence, I may
have been carried into this Party, for anything I know ; but,
somehow or other, I most certainly got there, and was in a
doorway looking on ; and in that look a New Year's Party
revealed itself to me, as a very long row of ladies and gentle-
men sitting against a wall, all drinking at once out of little
glass cups with handles, like custard-cups. What can this
Party have been ! I am afraid it must have been a dull one,
but I know it came off. Where can this Party have been ! I
have not the faintest notion where, but I am absolutely certain
it was somewhere. Why the company should all have been
drinking at once, and especially why they should all have
been drinking out of custard-cups, are points of fact over
which the Waters of Oblivion have long rolled. I doubt if
they can have been drinking the Old Year out and the New
One in, because they were not at supper and had no table be-
fore them. There was no speech-making, no quick move-
ment and change of action, no demonstration of any kind.
They were all sitting in a long row against the wall — very
like my first idea of the good people in Heaven, as I derived
it from a wretched picture in a Prayer-book — and they had
all got their heads a little thrown back, and were all drinking
at once. It is possible enough that I, the baby, may have
been caught up out of bed to have a peep at the company,
and that the company may happen to have been thus occu-
pied for the flash and space of a moment only. But, it has
always seemed to me as if I looked at them for a long time —
hours — during which they did nothing else ; and to this pres-
ent time, a casual mention in my hearing, of a Party on a
New Year's Day, always revives that picture.
190 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
On what other early New Year's Day can I possibly have
been an innocent accomplice in the secreting — in a coal cel-
lar too — of a man with a wooden leg! There was no man
with a wooden leg, .in the circle of my acknowledged and
lawful relations and friends. Yet, I clearly remember that
we stealthily conducted the man with the wooden leg — whom
we knew intimately — into the coal cellar, and that, in getting
him over the coals to hide him behind some partition there
was beyond, his wooden leg bored itself in among the small
coals, and his hat flew off, and he fell backward and lay prone :
a spectacle of helplessness. I clearly remember that his
struggles to get up among the small coals, and to obtain any
purchase on himself in those slippery and shifting circum-
stances, were a work of exceeding difficulty, involving delay
and noise that occasioned us excessive terror. I have not the
least idea who 'we' were, except that I had a little sister for
another innocent accomplice, and that there must have been
a servant girl for principal: neither do I know whether the
man with the wooden leg robbed the house, before or after-
wards, or otherwise nefariously distinguished himself. Nor,
how a cat came to be connected with the occasion, and had
a fit, and ran over the top of a door. But, I know that
some awful reason compelled us to hush it all up, and that
we 'never told.' For many years, I had this association with
a New Year's Day entirely to myself, until at last, the anni-
versary being come round again, I said to the little sister, as
she and I sat by chance among our children, 'Do you remem-
ber the New Year's Day of the man with the wooden leg?'
Whereupon, a thick black curtain which had overhung him
from her infancy, went up, and she saw just this much of the
man, and not a jot more. (A day or so before her death,
that little sister told me that, in the night, the smell of the
fallen leaves in the woods where we had habitually walked as
very young children, had come upon her with such strength
of reality that she had moved her weak head to look for
strewn leaves on the floor at her bedside. )
New Year's Day. It was on New Year's Day that I
fought a duel. Furious with love and jealousy, I 'went out'
with another gentleman of honour, to assert my passion for
NEW YEAR'S DAY 191
the loveliest and falsest of her sex. I estimate the age of that
young lady to have been about nine — my own age, about ten.
I knew the Queen of my soul, as 'the youngest Miss Clickitt
but one.' I had offered marriage, and my proposals had
been very favourably received, though not definitively closed
with. At which juncture, my enemy — Paynter, by name —
arose out of some abyss 01 cavern, and came between us.
The appearance of the Fiend Paynter, in the Clickitt Para-
dise, was altogether so mysterious and sudden, that I don't
know where he came from ; I only know that I found him, on
the surface of this earth, one afternoon late in the month of
December, playing at hot boiled beans and butter with th«
youngest Miss Clickitt but one. His conduct on that occa-
sion was such, that I sent a friend to Paynter. After endeav-
ouring with levity to evade the question, by pulling the
friend's cap off and throwing it into a cabbage-garden, Payn-
ter referred my messenger to his cousin — a goggle-eyed
Being worthy of himself. Preliminaries were arranged, and
by my own express stipulation the meeting was appointed for
New Year's Day, in order that one of us might quit this
state of existence on a day of mark. I passed a considerable
portion of the last evening of the old year in arranging my
affairs. I addressed a pathetic letter, and a goldfinch, to
the youngest Miss Clickitt but one (to be delivered into her
own hands by my friend, in case I should fall), and I wrote
another letter for my mother, and made a disposition of my
property: which consisted of books, some coloured engrav-
ings of Bamfylde Moore Carew, Mrs. Shipton, and others,
in a florid style of art, and a rather choice collection of
marbles. While engaged in these last duties, I suffered the
keenest anguish, and wept abundantly. The combat was to
begin with fists, but was to end anyhow. Dark presenti-
ments overshadowed my mind, because I had heard, on relia-
ble authority, that Paynter (whose father was paymaster of
some regiment stationed in the seaport where the conflict
impended), had a dirk and meant the worst. I had no other
arms, myself, than a blank cartridge, of which ammunition
we used to get driblets from the soldiers when they practised,
by following them up with tobacco, and bribing them with
192 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
pipes-full screwed in old copies, to pretend to load and not
to do it. This cartridge my friend and second had specially
recommended me, on the combat's assuming a mortal appear-
ance, to explode on the fell Paynter: which I, with some in-
definite view of blowing that gentleman up, had undertaken
to do, though the engineering details of the operation were
not at all adjusted. We met in a sequestered trench, among
the fortifications. Paynter had access to some old military
stores, and appeared on the ground in the regulation-cap of
a full-grown Private of the Second Royal Veteran Battalion.
— I see the boy now, coming from among the stinging-net-
tles in an angle of the trench, and making my blood run cold
by his terrible appearance. Preliminaries were arranged, and
we were to begin the struggle — this again was my express
stipulation — on the word being given, 'The youngest Miss
Clickitt but one !' At this crisis, a difference of opinion
arose between the seconds, touching the exact construction
of that article in the code of honour which prohibits 'hitting
below the waistcoat' ; and I rather think it arose from my
second's having manoeuvred the whole of my waistcoat into
the neighbourhood of my chin. However it arose, expres-
sions were used which Paynter, who I found had a very deli-
cate sense of honour, could not permit to pass. He immedi-
ately dropped his guard, and appealed to me whether it was
not our duty most reluctantly to forego our own gratifica-
tion until the two gentlemen in attendance on us had estab-
lished their honour? I warmly assented; I did more; I im-
mediately took my friend aside, and lent him the cartridge.
But, so unworthy of our confidence were those seconds that
they declined, in spite alike of our encouragements and our
indignant remonstrances, to engage. This made it plain
both to Paynter and myself, that we had but one painful
course to take; which was, to leave them ('with loathing,'
Paynter said, and I highly approved), and go away arm in
arm. He gave me to understand as we went along that he
too was a victim of the perfidy of the youngest Miss Clickitt
but one, and I became exceedingly fond of him before we
parted.
And here is another New Year's Day coming back under
NEW YEAR'S DAY 193
the influence of the Wand which is better than Harlequin's!
What New Year's Day is this? This is the New Year's Day
of the annual gathering of later times at Boles's. Mr. Boles
lives in a high, bleak, Down-country, where the wind never
leaves off whistling all the year round, unless it takes to roar-
ing. Mr. Boles has chimney-corners in his house, as big as
other people's rooms ; Mr. Boles's larder is as the larder of an
amiable giant, and Mr. Boles's kitchen corresponds thereto.
In Mr. Boles's Boudoirs sits Miss Boles: a blessed creature:
a Divinity. In Mr. Boles's bed-chambers, is a ghost. In
Mr. Boles's house, in short, is everything desirable — and un-
der Mr. Boles's house is Mr. Boles's cellar. So many are
the New Year's Days I have passed at Mr. Boles's, that I
have won my way, like an enlisted Son of the vanished
French Republic one and indivisible, through a regular series
of promotions: beginning with the non-commissioned bed-
rooms, passing through the subaltern bedrooms, ascending
in the scale until, on the New Year's Day now obedient to the
Wand, I inhabit the Field-Marshal bedroom. But, where is
Mr. Boles, now I have risen so high in the service? Alack!
I go out, now-a-days, into the windy snow-drift, or the windy
frost, or windy rain, or windy sunshine — of a certainty into
the windy weather, let it be what else it may — to look at Mr.
Boles's tomb in the little churchyard : where, while the avenue
of elms is gustily tossed and troubled, like Life, the one dark
yew-tree in the shadow of the bell-tower is solemnly at rest,
like Death. And Miss Boles? She, too, is departed, though
only into the world of matrons, not of shadows; and she is
my hostess now; and she is a blessed creature (in the byegone
sense of making the ground she walks on, worshipful), no
more ; and I have outlived my passion for her, and I perceive
her appetite to be healthy, and her nose to be red. What of
that? Are the seasons to stop for me? There are Boleses
coming on, though under the different name into which the
blessed creature gone for ever, (if she ever really came)
sunk her own. In the old Boles boudoirs, there are still
blessed creatures and divinities — to somebody, though not to
me. If I suspect that the present non-commissioned officers
and subalterns don't love as I did when I held those ranks,
194 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
are not half as unselfishly faithful as I was, not half as ten-
derly devoted as I was, not half as passionately miserable as
I was, what then ? It may be so ; it may not be so ; but the
world is, on the whole, round, and it is ever turning. If
my old type has disappeared for the moment, it will come up
again in its right place, when its right time brings it upward.
Moreover, what am I, even as I know myself, that I should
bemoan the disappearance, real or fancied, of the like of Me?
Because I am not virtuous, shall there be no cakes but of my
kneading, no ale but of my brewing? Far from me be the
thought! When it comes near me, and stays by me, I may
know of a surety that New Year's Days are finally closing in
around me, and that, in a scheme where nothing created
stops, I cannot too soon cease to be an insignificant anomaly.
Therefore, O New Year's Days of the old Boles time, and of
all my old time, may you be ever welcome ! Therefore, non-
commissioned officers, subalterns, lieutenants, all, of the Boles
spare bedrooms, I, from the Field-Marshal chamber stretch
out my poor hand, entreating cordiality of union among all
degrees, and cheerfully declaring my readiness to join as well
as I can, in the last new figures of the Dance of Life, rather
than growl and grumble, with no partner, down the Dance
of Death.
And here is another New Year's Day responsive to the
Wand of the season before I have dismissed the last. An
Italian New Year's Day, this, and the bright Mediterranean,
with a stretch of violet and purple shore, formed the first leaf
in the book of the New Year that I turned at daybreak this
morning. On the steep hill-sides between me and the sea,
diversified by many a patch of cypress-trees and tangled
vines, is a wild medley of roof upon roof, church upon
church, terrace upon terrace, wall upon wall, tower upon
tower. Questioning myself whether I am not descended,
without having thought of it before, in a direct line from the
good Haroun Alraschid, I tread the tesselated pavement of
the garden-terrace, watch the gold-fish in the marble foun-
tains, loiter in the pleasant grove of orange-trees, and be-
come a moving pillar of fragrance by unromantically
pocketing a green lemon, now and then, with an eye to Punch
NEW YEAR'S DAY 195
to-night in the English manner. It is not the New Year's
Day of a dream, but of broad awake fact, that finds me
housed in a palace, with a highly popular ghost and twen-
ty-five spare bedrooms : over the stone and marble floors of
which deserted halls, the highly popular ghost (unquiet spirit
of a Porter, one would think), drags all the heavy furniture
at dead of night. Down in the town, in the street of Happy
Charles, at the shop of the Swiss confectioner, there is at this
moment, and is all day, an eager group examining the
great Twelve-cake — or, as my good friend and servant
who speaks all languages and knows none, renders it to the
natives, pane dolce numero dodici — sweet bread number
twelve — which has come as a present all the way from
Signer Gunter's della Piazza Berkeley, Londra, Inghilterra,
and which got cracked in coming, and is in the street of
Happy Charles to be mended, and the like of which has
never been seen. It comes back at sunset (in order that the
man who brings it on his head may get clear off before
the ghost is due), and is set out as a show in the great
hall. In the great hall, made as light as all our lights can
make it — which is rather dark, it must be confessed — we
assemble at night, to 'keep it up,' in the English manner;
meaning by 'v/e,' the handful of English dwelling in that
city, and the half handful of English who have married there
into other nations, and the rare old Italian Cavaliere, who
improvises, writes poetry, plays harps, composes music, paints
pictures, and is always inaugurating somebody's bust in his
little garden. Brown is the rare old Cavaliere's face, but
green his young enthusiastic heart ; and whatever we do upon
this mad New Year's Night, the Cavaliere gaily bears his
part in, and believes to be essentially an English custom,
which all the English observe. When we enact grotesque
charades, or disperse in the wildest exaggeration of an
obsolete country-dance through the five-and-twenty empty
rooms, the Cavaliere, ever foremost, believes in his soul that
all provincial respectability and metropolitan variety, all
Canterbury Precinct, Whitfield Tabernacle, Saint James's
Parish, Clapham, and Whitechapel, are religiously doing the
same thing; and he cries, 'Dear England, merry England,
196 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the young and the joyous, home of the Fancy, free as the
air, playful as the child !' So enchanted is the dear Cavaliere
(at about three in the morning, and after lemons), that he
folds my hand flat, inside his white waistcoat, folds his own
two over it, and walks me up and down the Hall, meekly
prisoner, while he improvises an enormous poem on the sports
of England; which poem, I think, throughout, I am going
to begin to understand presently, but of which I do not com-
prehend one lonely word. Nor, does even this severe intel-
lectual exercise use up the Cavaliere, for, after going home
and playing the harp I don't know how many hours, he flies
out of bed, seizes pen, ink and paper — the mechanical appli-
ances of the whole circle of the Arts are always at his bed-
side, ready against inspiration in the night — and writes
quite a Work on the same subject: as the blotted, piebald
manuscript he sends to me before I am up next day,
affectingly testifies. Said manuscript is inscribed to myself,
most illustrious Signor, kissing my hands, and is munificently
placed at the disposal of any English publisher whom it may
please to undertake a translation.
And here is another New Year's Day invoked by the Wand
of the time, and this New Year's Day is a French one, and
a bitter, bitter cold one. All Paris is out of doors. Along
the line of the Boulevards runs a double row of stalls, like
the stalls at an English fair; and surely those are hard to
please, in all small wares and all small gambling, who cannot
be pleased here. Paris is out of doors in its newest and
brightest clothes. Paris is making presents to the Universe
— which is well known to be Paris. Paris will eat more bon-
bons this day, than in the whole bon-bon eating year.
Paris will dine out this day, more than ever. In homage to
the day, the peculiar glory of the always-glorious plate-glass
windows of the Restorers in the Palais Royal, where rare
summer-vegetables from Algiers contend with wonderful
great pears from the richest soils of France, and with little
plump birds of exquisite plumage, direct from the skies. In
homage to the day, the glittering brilliancy of the sweet-
shops, teeming with beautiful arrangement of colours, and
with beautiful tact and taste in trifles. In homage to the
NEW YEAR'S DAY 197
day, the new Review — Dramas at the Theatre of Varieties,
and the Theatre of Vaudevilles, and the Theatre of the
Palais Royal. In homage to the day, the new Drama in
seven acts, and incalculable pictures, at the Ambiguously
Comic Theatre, the Theatre of the Gate of Saint Martin,
and the Theatre of Gaiety: at which last establishment par-
ticularly, a brooding Englishman can, by intensity of inter-
est, get himself made wretched for a fortnight. In homage
to the day, the extra-announcing of these Theatres, and
fifty more, and the queues of blouses already, at three
o'clock in the afternoon, penned up in the cold wind on the
cold stone pavement outside them. Spite of wind and frost,
the Elysian Fields and the Wood of Boulogne are filled
with equipages, equestrians, and pedestrians: while the
strange, rackety, rickety, up-all-night looking world of eat-
ing-house, tombstone maker, ball-room, cemetery, and wine-
shop, outside the Barriers, is as thickly-peopled as the Paris
streets themselves ; with one universal tendency observable in
both hemispheres, to sit down upon any public seat at a
risk of being frozen to death, and to go round and round
on a hobby-horse in any roundabout, to the music of a
barrel organ, as a severe act of duty. And now, this New
Year's Day tones down into night, and the brilliantly
lighted city shines out like the gardens of the Wonderful
Lamp, and the penned blouses flutter into the Theatres in
orderly line, and the confidential men, not unaccustomed to
lean on umbrellas as they survey mankind of an afternoon,
who have tickets to sell cheap, are very busy among them,
and the women money-takers shut up in strong iron-cages
are busy too, and the three men all of a row behind a breast-
work who take the checks are busy too, and the women box-
openers with their footstools begin to be busy too, but as yet
not very, and the curtain goes up for the curtain-rising
piece, and the gloomy young gentleman with the tight black
head and the new black moustache is as much in love as ever
with the young lady whose eyebrows are very arched and
whose voice is very thin, and the gloomy young gentleman's
experienced friend (generally chewing something, by the
bye, and I wonder what), who leans his back against the
198 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
cHmney -piece and reads him lessons of life, is just as cool
as he always was, and an amazing circumstance to me is,
that they are always doing this thing and no other thing, and
that I don't find them to have any place in the great event
of the evening, and that I want to know whether they go
home when they have done it, or what becomes of them.
Meanwhile, gushes of cookery rise with the night air from
the Restorer's kitchens ; and the guests at the Cafe of Paris,
and the Cafe of the Three Provincial Brothers, and the
Cafe Vefour, and the Cafe Verey, and the Gilded House,
and others of first class, are reflected in wildernesses of look-
ing-glass, and sit on red velvet and order dinner out of red
velvet books ; while the citizens at the Cafe Champeaux near
the Bourse, and others of second class, sit on rush-bottomed
chairs, and have their dinner-library bound in plain leather,
though they dine well too ; while both kinds of company have
plenty of children with them (which is pleasant to me,
though I think they begin life biliously), and both unite in
eating everything that is set before them. But, now it is
eight o'clock upon this New Year's evening. The new
Dramas being about to begin, bells ring violently in the
Theatre lobbies and rooms, and cigars, coffee cups, and small
glasses are hastily abandoned, and I find myself assisting at
one of the Review-pieces: where I notice that the English
gentleman's stomach isn't very like, because it doesn't fit him,
and wherein I doubt the accurate nationality of the Eng-
lish lady's walking on her toes with an upward jerk behind.
The Review is derived from various times and sources, and
when I have seen David the Palmist in his droll scene with
Mahomet and Abd-el-Kader, and have heard the best joke
and best song that Eve (a charming young lady, but liable,
I should fear, to take cold) has in her part (which occurs in
her scene with the Sieur Framboisie), I think I will step out
to the Theatre of Gaiety, and see what they are about there.
I am so fortunate as to arrive in the nick of time to find
the very estimable man just eloped with the wife of the much
less estimable man whom Destiny has made a bore, and to
find her honest father just arriving from the country by one
door, encountering the father of the very estimable man just
NEW YEAR'S DAY 199
arriving from the country by another door, and to hear them
launch cross-curses — her father at him: his father at her —
which so deeply affects a martial gentleman of tall stature
and dark complexion, in the next stall to mine, that, tak-
ing his handkerchief from his hat to dry his eyes, he pulls
out with it several very large lumps of sugar which he
abstracted when he took his coffee, and showers them over my
legs — exceedingly to my confusion, but not at all to his.
The drop-curtain being, to appearance, down for a long time,
I think I will step on a little further — say to the Theatre of
the Scavengers — and see what they are doing there. At
the Theatre of the Scavengers, I find Pierrot on a voyage. I
know he is aboard ship, because I can see nothing but sky;
and I infer that the crew are aloft from the circumstance of
two rope-ladders crossing the stage and meeting at top;
about midway on each of which hangs, contemplating the
public, an immovable young lady in male attire, with highly
unseamanlike pink legs. This spectacle reminds me of
another New Year's Day at home in England, where I saw
the brave William, lover of Black-Eyed Susan, tried by a
Court Martial composed entirely of ladies, wearing percepti-
ble combs in their heads : with the exception of the presiding
Admiral, who was so far gone in liquor that I trembled to
think what could possibly be done respecting the catastrophe,
if he should take it in his head to record the verdict 'Not
guilty.' On this present New Year's Day, I find Pierrot suf-
fering, in various ways, so very much from sea-sickness, that
I soon leave the congregated Scavengers in possession of
him; but not before I have gathered from the bill that in
the case even of his drama, as of every other French piece,
it takes at least two men to write it. So, I pass this New
Year's evening, which is a French one, looking about me
until midnight: when, going into a Boulevard cafe on my
way home, I find the elderly men who are always playing
dominoes there, or always looking on at one another playing
dominoes there, hard at it still, not in the least moved by
the stir and novelty of the day, not in the least minding the
New Year.
200 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
CHIPS
[JULY 6, 1850]
THEKE is a saying that a good workman is known by his
chips. Such a prodigious accumulation of chips takes place
in our Manufactory, that we infer we must have some first-
rate workmen about us.
There is also a figure of speech, concerning a chip of the
old block. The chips with which our old block (aged fifteen
weeks) is overwhelmed every week, would make some five-and-
iwenty blocks of similar dimensions.
There is a popular simile — an awkward one in this con-
jjexion — founded on the dryness of a chip. This has almost
deterred us from our intention of bundling a few chips to-
gether now and then. But, reflection on the natural lightness
of the article has reassured us ; and we here present a few to
our readers, — and shall continue to do so from time to
time.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LOCOMOTIVES
[SEPTEMBER 21, 1850]
IT is a remarkable truth, and, well applied, it might be
profitable to us, in helping us to make fair allowance for the
differences between the temperaments of different men —
that every Locomotive Engine running on a Railway, has a
distinct individuality and character of its own.
It is perfectly well known to experienced practical engi-
neers, that if a dozen different Locomotive Engines were
made, at the same time, of the same power, for the same
purpose, of like materials, in the same Factory — each of
those Locomotive Engines would come out with its own
peculiar whims and ways, only ascertainable by experience.
One engine will take a great meal of coke and water at once;
another will not hear of such a thing, but will insist on being
coaxed by spades-full and buckets-full. One is disposed to
CHIPS 201
start off, when required, at the top of his speed; another
must have a little time to warm at his work, and to get well
into it. These peculiarities are so accurately mastered by skil-
ful drivers, that only particular men can persuade particular
engines to do their best. It would seem as if some of these
'excellent monsters' declared, on being brought out of the
stable, 'If it 's Smith who is to drive me, I won't go. If
it 's my friend Stokes, I am agreeable to anything !'
All Locomotive Engines are low-spirited in damp and
foggy weather. They have a great satisfaction in their
work when the air is crisp and frosty. At such a time they
are very cheerful and brisk; but they strongly object to haze
and Scotch mists. These are points of character on which
they are all united. It is in their peculiarities and varieties
of character that they are most remarkable.
The Railway Company who should consign all their
Locomotives to one uniform standard of treatment, without
any allowance for varying shades of character and opinion,
would soon fall as much behind-hand in the world as those
greater Governments are, and ever will be, who pursue the
same course with the finer piece of work called Man.
HOMCEOPATHY
[NOVEMBER 15, 1851]
WE have never been subjects of the Homeopathic mode of
treatment, nor have we ever been concerned in making others
so. But as we desire to state the Homoeopathic Doctrine
fairly, like all other doctrines to which we make any refer-
ence, and as it has been suggested to us that we may have
scarcely done so in a passing allusion to it at page 592 of
the last volume of this journal, we will here reprint the fol-
lowing extract from a work in explanation of Homeopathic
principles, by Dr. Epps.
'It is not maintained that a millionth part of a grain or a
drop (to take a given, though a large quantity, in homceo-
202 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
pathic administration,) will produce any visible action on the
man in health ; nor is it maintained that a millionth part of
a grain or of a drop will act on the man in disease: but it
is maintained that the millionth part of a grain or of a drop
will act on the man in disease, if between the diseased state
of the man and the medicine, infinitesimally administered,
there is a homoeopathic relationship. In other words, the
homoeopathists do not vaguely say that medicines in infini-
tesimal dozes cure diseases ; but they do say that medicines
given for the cure of diseases to which they are homoeopathic,
do cure these diseases when administered in infinitesimal
quantities; to repeat, the homoeopathist, in maintaining the
efficacy of medicines in infinitesimal quantities, regards three
requirements as necessary: — First, the development of vir-
tues in medicines by the process of preparation; second, the
increased receptivity to impression produced by disease; and
third, the selection of the right remedy.'
THE FINE ARTS IN AUSTRALIA
[MARCH 13, 1852]
THERE is a picture now lodged at the Amateur Gallery, 121
Pall Mall, which, apart from its own merits, is rendered inter-
esting by being the first large picture ever painted, or (by
many people) ever sten, in Australia.
It is an illustration of the Scripture, 'Suffer little children
to come unto me.' The painter is Mr. Marshall Claxton. It
was produced under the following circumstances.
In the summer of the year 1850, a munificent lady residing-
in London, and distinguished everywhere for her gentle
generosity and goodness, commissioned Mr. Claxton to paint
this picture for the interior decoration of an Infant School.
Mr. Claxton was then on the eve of emigrating to Sydney-
If he might only consider the subject on the voyage, he
said, and paint it in the land of his adoption, what a pride
he would have in showing it to his new countrymen, and
what a testimony it would be to them that he was not slighted
CHIPS 203
in Old England! The commission was freely entrusted tc
him to be so dealt with; and away he sailed, light of heart
and strong of purpose.
How he studied it, and sketched it, month after month, dur-
ing the long voyage ; and how he found it a companion in
whom there was always something new to be discovered, and
of whom he never tired; needs not to be told. But when
he came to Sydney, he could find no house suited to his re-
quirements, with a room large enough to paint the picture in.
So, he asked the Committee of the Sydney College for the
loan of that building ; 'and, it being handsomely conceded,
went to work there.
It may be questioned whether any Australian models had
ever sat before, to painting man. At all events, models or
not models, the general population of Sydney became so
excited about this picture, and were so eager to see it in every
stage of its progress, that seven thousand persons, first and
last, dropped in to look at it. And such an object was as
new to many of them, as the travelling elephant was to the
young men on the banks of the Mississippi, when he made
a pilgrimage 'a while ago,' with his caravan, to those far-
off regions.
Thus, the Picture was imagined, painted, and sent home.
Thus, it is, at the present writing, lodged in Pall Mall —
the dawn perhaps of the longest day for the fine arts, as for
all the arts of life, that ever rose upon the world. As the
bright eyes of the children in the Infant School will often, in
these times, rest upon it with the awe and wonder of its
having come so far over the deep sea; so, perhaps, Mr.
Macaulay's traveller, standing, in a distant age, upon the
ruins of an old cathedral once called St. Paul's, in the
midst of a desert once called London, will look about him
with similar emotions for any broken stones that may possibly
be traces of the School, said in the Australian nursery-legend
to have contained the first important picture painted in that
ancient country.
204 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
THE GHOST OF THE COCK LANE GHOST WRONG AGAIN
[JANUARY 15, 1853]
THE exhibitor of the spirit-rapping at the small charge of
one guinea per head, or five guineas for a party of ten ; the
Mr. Stone who 'begs leave to inform the nobility and gentry,
that he has just returned from the United States, accom-
panied by Mrs. M. B. Hayden, for the purpose of Demon-
strating the wonderful Phenomena known in that country as
Spiritual Manifestations, and which have created the most
intense excitement among all classes of society,' — as described
at page 217 of our present volume * — has been exhibiting
Electro-Biology in London to certain dismal little audi-
ences ; and has attempted to enliven the very dreary perform-
ances by pressing the name of Mr. Charles Dickens into his
service, and delivering himself of accounts of a personal
interview held by himself and his Medium with that gentle-
man at the house in Upper Seymour Street, Portman
Square, where all classes of society are intensely excited every
day at from eleven to two, and from four to six.
As a further warning to the gullible who may be disposed to
put their trust in this exhibitor's 'facts,' we may inform them
that he, and his Medium, with their troops of spirits and their
electro-biological penetration to boot, are as wide of the truth
in this as in everything else. Mr. Dickens was never at the
intensely exciting house and never beheld any of its intensely
exciting inhabitants. Two trustworthy gentlemen attached
to this Journal tested the spirit rappers at his request, and
found them to be the egregious absurdity described.
READY WIT
[FEBRUARY 4, 1854]
As an instance of a correspondent who thoroughly under>.
stands a joke, and possesses a quick wit and a happy compre-
i Refers to Household Words. See a previous article entitled Th«
Spirit Business.
SUPPOSING! 205
hension, we cannot resist the temptation that is upon us to
print the following genuine letter : —
'SiR, — I happened this afternoon to take up the last num-
ber of your Household Words, whilst waiting to see my doc-
tor, at whose house I had called. It has often struck me,
when reading your writings, that the tendency of your mind
is to hold up to derision those of the higher classes. I refer
you for the present to the Ignoble Nobleman as written by
you and published this month. Now we find recorded in
Scripture the world described as hateful and hating one
another, and I would call your attention to the third chap-
ter of Paul's Epistle to Titus ; read the first six verses, and
see what believers in — the son of the living — are called upon
to do, and then judge yourself, that ye be not judged. I
would invoke you into a kinder spirit, and be ye a doer of the
word and not a hearer only.
'I am, Sir,
*Your very obedt.,
*A COMMONER.'
SUPPOSING!
[APRIL 20, 1850]
SUPPOSING, we were to change the Property and Income Tax
a little and make it somewhat heavier on realised property,
and somewhat lighter on mere income, fixed and uncertain,
I wonder whether we should be committing any violent
injustice!
Supposing, we were to be more Christian and less mystical,
agreeing more about the spirit and fighting less about the
letter, I wonder whether we should present a very irreligious
and indecent spectacle to the mass of mankind !
Supposing, the Honourable Member for White troubled
his head a little less about the Honourable Member for
Black, and vice versa, and that both applied themselves a
little more in earnest to the real business of the honourable
206 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
people and the honourable country, I wonder whether it
would be unparliamentary !
Supposing, that, when there was a surplus in the Public
Treasury, we laid aside our own particular whims, and all
agreed that there were four elements necessary to the exist-
ence of our fellow-creatures, to wit, earth, air, fire, and water,
and that these were the first grand necessaries to be uncooped
and untaxed, I wonder whether it would be unreasonable !
Supposing, we had at this day a Baron Jenner, or a Vis-
count Watt, or an Earl Stephenson, or a Marquess of Brunei,
or a dormant Shakespeare peerage, or a Hogarth baronetcy,
I wonder whether it would be cruelly disgraceful to our old
nobility I
Supposing, we were all of us to come off our pedestals and
mix a little more with those below us, with no fear but that
genius, rank, and wealth, would always sufficiently assert their
own superiority, I wonder whether we should lower ourselves
beyond retrieval!
Supposing, we were to have less botheration and more real
education, I wonder whether we should have less or more com-
pulsory colonisation, and Cape of Good Hope very natural
indignation 1
Supposing, we were materially to simplify the laws, and to
abrogate the absurd fiction that everybody is supposed to be
acquainted with them, when we know very well that such
acquaintance is the study of a life in which some fifty men
may have been proficient perhaps in five times fifty years, I
wonder whether laws would be respected less?
Supposing, we maintained too many of such fictions alto-
gether, and found their stabling come exceedingly expensive !
Supposing, we looked about us, and seeing a cattle-market
originally established in an open place, standing in the midst
of a great city because of the unforeseen growth of that
great city all about it, and hearing it asserted that the mar-
ket was still adapted to the requirements and conveniences of
the great city, made up our minds to say that this was stark-
mad nonsense and we wouldn't bear it, I wonder whether we
should be revolutionary !
Supposing, we were to harbour a small suspicion that
SUPPOSING! 207
there was too much doing in the diplomatic line of business,
and that the world would get on better with that shop shut up
three days a- week, I wonder whether it would be a huge
impiety !
Supposing, Governments were to consider public questions
less with reference to their own time, and more with reference
to all time, I wonder how we should get on then !
Supposing, the wisdom of our ancestors should turn out to
be a mere phrase, and that if there were any sense in it, it
should follow that we ought to be believers in the worship of
the Druids at this hour, I wonder whether any people would
have talked mere moonshine all their lives !
Supposing, we were clearly to perceive that we cannot keep
some men out of their share in the administration of affairs,
and were to say to them, 'Come, brothers, let us take counsel
together, and see how we can best manage this; and don't
expect too much from what you get; and let us all in our
degree put our shoulders to the wheel, and strive; and let us
all improve ourselves and all abandon something of our ex-
treme opinions for the general harmony,' I wonder whether
we should want so many special constables on any future
tenth of April, or should talk so much about it any more !
I wonder whether people who are quite easy about any-
thing, usually do talk quite so much about it !
Mr. Lane, the traveller, tells us of a superstition the
Egyptians have, that the mischievous Genii are driven away
by iron, of which they have an instinctive dread. Suppos-
ing, this should foreshadow the disappearance of the evil
spirits and ignorances besetting this earth, before the iron
steam-engines and roads, I wonder whether we could expedite
their flight at all by iron energy !
Supposing, we were just to try two or three of these ex-
periments !
[AUGUST 10, 1850]
SUPPOSING a Royal Duke were to die. Which is not a great
stretch of supposition,
For golden lads and lasses must,
Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust:
208 MISCELLAXEOUS PAPERS
Supposing he had been a good old Duke with a thoroughly
kind heart, and generous nature, always influenced by a sin-
cere desire to-do right, and always doing it, like a man and
a gentleman, to the best of his ability:
And supposing, this Royal Duke left a son, against
whom there was no imputation or reproach, but of whom all
men were disposed to think well, and had no right or reason
to think otherwise:
And supposing, this Royal Duke, though possessed of a
very handsome income in his life-time, had not made provision
for this son; and a rather accommodating Government (in
such matters) were to make provision for him, at the expense
of the public, on a scale wholly unsuited to the nature of the
public burdens, past, present, and prospective, and bearing
no proportion to any kind of public reward, for any sort of
public service :
I wonder whether the country could then, with any justice,
complain, that the Royal Duke had not himself provided for
his son, instead of leaving his son a charge upon the
people !
I should think the question would depend upon this: —
Whether the country had ever given the good Duke to under-
stand, that it, in the least degree, expected him to provide for
his son. If it never did anything of the sort, but always
conveyed to him, in every possible way, the rapturous assur-
ance that there was a certain amount of troublesome Hotel
business to be done, which nobody but a Royal Duke could by
any possibility do, or the business would lose its grace and
flavour, then, I should say, the good Duke aforesaid might
reasonably suppose that he made sufficient provision for his
son, in leaving him the Hotel business ; and that the country
would be a very unreasonable country, if it made any com-
plaint.
Supposing the country did complain, though, after all. I
wonder what it would still say, in Committee, Sub Committee,
Charitable Association, and List of Stewards, if any ungen-
teel person were to propose ignoble chairmen !
Because I should like the country to be consistent.
SUPPOSING! 209
[JUNE 7, 1851]
SUPPOSING a stipendiary magistrate, honourably distin-
guished for his careful, sensible, and upright decisions, were
to have brought before him, a Socialist or Chartist, proved
to have wilfully, and without any palliative circumstance
whatsoever, assaulted the police in the execution of their
duty:
And supposing that stipendiary magistrate committed
that Socialist or Chartist to prison for the offence, stead-
fastly refusing to adopt the alternative unjustly and par-
tially allowed him by the law, of permitting the offender to
purchase immunity by the payment of a fine :
And supposing one of the great unpaid county magistrates
were to take upon himself virtually to abrogate the rules
observed, in all other cases, in that prison, by introducing,
say fourteen visitors, to that Socialist or Chartist during his
one week's imprisonment:
I wonder whether Sir George Grey, or any other Home
Secretary for the time being, would then consider it his duty
to take a very decided course of objection to the proceedings
of that county magistrate.
And supposing that the prisoner, instead of being a
Socialist or Chartist, were a gentleman of good family, and
that County Magistrate did exactly this same thing, I wonder
what Sir George Grey or any other Home Secretary for the
time being, would do then.
Because, supposing he did nothing, I should strongly
doubt his doing right.
[SEPTEMBER 6, 1851]
SUPPOSING that among the news in a Weekly Newspaper —
say, the Examiner for Saturday the twenty-third of August
in the present year — there were stated in succession two
cases, presenting a monstrous contrast.
Supposing that the first of these cases were the case of
an indigent woman, the wife of a labouring man, who died in
210 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
a most deplorable and abject condition, neglected and un-
assisted by the parish authorities :
Supposing that the second of these cases were the case of
an infamous woman, drunken and profligate, a convicted
felon, a returned transport, an habitual inmate of Houses of
Correction, destitute of the lowest attributes of decency, a
Pet Prisoner in the Model Prison, where the interesting
creature was presented with a large gratuity for her excellent
conduct :
I wonder whether it would occur to any governing power
in the country, that there might be something wrong here !
Because I make bold to say, that such a shocking in-
stance of Pet Prisoning and Pet Poor Law administering
has profounder depths of mischief in it than Red Tape can
fathom.
[FEBRUARY 10, 1855]
SUPPOSING that a gentleman named Mr. Sidney Herbert were
to get up in the House of Commons, to make the best case
he could of a system of mismanagement that had filled all
England with grief and shame:
And supposing that this gentleman were to expatiate to
the House of Commons on the natural helplessness of our
English soldiers, consequent on their boots being made by
one man, their clothes by another, their houses by another,
and so forth — blending a sentimental political economy with
Red Tape, in a very singular manner:
I wonder, in such case, whether it would be out of order to
suggest the homely fact that indeed it is not the custom to
enlist the English Soldier in his cradle ; that there really are
instances of his having been something else before becoming a
soldier, and that perhaps there is not a Regiment in the
service but includes within its ranks, a number of men more
or less expert in every handicraft-trade under the Sun.
MISCELLANIES
FROM
ALL THE YEAR ROUND
1859-1869
ADDRESS WHICH APPEARED SHORTLY
PREVIOUS TO THE COMPLETION OF
THE TWENTIETH VOLUME (1868) OF
INTIMATING A NEW SERIES OF 'ALL
THE YEAR ROUND'
I BEG to announce to the readers of this Journal, that on the
completion of the Twentieth Volume on the Twenty-eighth of
November, in the present year, I shall commence an entirely
New Series of All the Year Round. The change is not only
due to the convenience of the public (with which a set of such
books, extending beyond twenty large volumes, would be quite
incompatible), but is also resolved upon for the purpose of
effecting some desirable improvements in respect of type, pa-
per, and size of page, which could not otherwise be made.
To the Literature of the New Series it would not become me
to refer, beyond glancing at the pages of this Journal, and
of its predecessor, through a score of years ; inasmuch as my
regular fellow-labourers and I will be at our old posts, in
company with those younger comrades, whom I have had the
pleasure of enrolling from time to time, and whose number
it is always one of my pleasantest editorial duties to enlarge.
As it is better that every kind of work honestly undertaken
and discharged, should speak for itself than be spoken for, I
will only remark further on one intended omission in the New
Series. The Extra Christmas Number has now been so ex-
tensively, and regularly, and often imitated, that it is in very
great danger of becoming tiresome. I have therefore re-
solved (though I cannot add, willingly) to abolish it, at the
highest tide of its success.
CHARLES DICKENS.
213
214 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
THE POOR MAN AND HIS BEER 1
[APRIL 30, 1859]
MY friend Philosewers and I, contemplating a farm-labourer
the other day, who was drinking his mug of beer on a settle at
a roadside ale-house door, we fell to humming the fag-end of
an old ditty, of which the poor man and his beer, and the
sin of parting them, form the doleful burden. Philosewers
then mentioned to me that a friend of his in an agricultural
county — say a Hertfordshire friend — had, for two years last
past, endeavoured to reconcile the poor man and his beer to
public morality, by making it a point of honour between him-
self and the poor man that the latter should use his beer and
not abuse it. Interested in an effort of so unobtrusive and
unspeechifying a nature, 'O Philosewers,' said I, after the
manner of the dreary sages in Eastern apologues, 'Show me,
I pray, the man who deems that temperance can be attained
without a medal, an oration, a banner, and a denunciation of
half the world, and who has at once the head and heart to set
about it!'
Philosewers expressing, in reply, his willingness to gratify
the dreary sage, an appointment was made for the purpose.
And on the day fixed, I, the Dreary one, accompanied by
Philosewers, went down Nor'-West per railway, in search of
temperate temperance. It was a thunderous day ; and the
clouds were so immoderately watery, and so very much dis-
posed to sour all the beer in Hertfordshire, that they seemed
to have taken the pledge.
But, the sun burst forth gaily in the afternoon, and gilded
the old gables, and old mullioned windows, and old weather-
cock and old clock-face, of the quaint old house which is the
dwelling of the man we sought. How shall I describe him?
As one of the most famous practical chemists of the age?
That designation will do as well as another — better, perhaps,
than most others. And his name? Friar Bacon.
See poem 'The Blacksmith.'
THE POOR MAN AND HIS BEER 215
'Though, take notice, Philosewers,' said I, behind my hand,
'that the first Friar Bacon had not that handsome lady-wife
beside him. Wherein, O Philosewers, he was a chemist,
wretched and forlorn, compared with his successor. Young
Romeo bade the holy father Lawrence hang up philosophy,
unless philosophy could make a Juliet. Chemistry would
infallibly be hanged if its life were staked on making any-
thing half so pleasant as this Juliet.' The gentle Philosewers
smiled assent.
The foregoing whisper from myself, the Dreary one,
tickled the ear of Philosewers, as we walked on the trim gar-
den terrace before dinner, among the early leaves and blos-
soms ; two peacocks, apparently in very tight new boots, oc-
casionally crossing the gravel at a distance. The sun, shining
through the old house-windows, now and then flashed out some
brilliant piece of colour from bright hangings within, or upon
the old oak panelling ; similarly, Friar Bacon, as we paced to
and fro, revealed little glimpses of his good work.
'It is not much,' said he. 'It is no wonderful thing.
There used to be a great deal of drunkenness here, and I
wanted to make it better if I could. The people are very ig-
norant, and have been much neglected, and I wanted to make
that better, if I could. My utmost object was, to help them
to a little self-government and a little homely pleasure. I
only show the way to better things, and advise them. I never
act for them ; I never interfere ; above all, I never patronise.'
I had said to Philosewers as we came along Nor'-West
that patronage was one of the curses of England ; I appeared
to rise in the estimation of Philosewers when thus confirmed.
'And so,' said Friar Bacon, 'I established my Allotment-
club, and my pig-clubs, and those little Concerts by the ladies
of my own family, of which we have the last of the season
this evening. They are a great success, for the people here
are amazingly fond of music. But there is the early dinner-
bell, and I have no need to talk of my endeavours when you
will soon see them in their working dress.'
Dinner done, behold the Friar, Philosewers, and myself the
Dreary one, walking, at six o'clock, across the fields, to the
'Club-house.'
216
As we swung open the last field-gate and entered the Allot-
ment-grounds, many members were already on their way to
the Club, which stands in the midst of the allotments. Who
could help thinking of the wonderful contrast between these
club-men and the club-men of St. James's Street, or Pall Mall,
in London ! Look at yonder prematurely old man, doubled
up with work, and leaning on a rude stick more crooked than
himself, slowly trudging to the club-house, in a shapeless hat
like an Italian harlequin's, or an old brown-paper bag, leath-
ern leggings, and dull green smock-frock, looking as though
duck-weed had accumulated on it — the result of its stagnant
life — or as if it were a vegetable production, originally meant
to blow into something better, but stopped somehow. Com-
pare him with Old Cousin Feenix, ambling along St. James's
Street, got up in the style of a couple of generations ago, and
with a head of hair, a complexion, and a set of teeth, pro-
foundly impossible to be believed in by the widest stretch of
human credulity. Can they both be men and brothers?
Verily they are. And although Cousin Feenix has lived so
fast that he will die at Baden-Baden, and although this club-
man in the frock has lived, ever since he came to man's estate,
on nine shillings a week, and is sure to die in the Union if he
die in bed, yet he brought as much into the world as Cousin
Feenix, and will take as much out — more, for more of him is
real.
A pretty, simple building, the club-house, with a rustic
colonnade outside, under which the members can sit on wet
evenings, looking at the patches of ground they cultivate for
themselves; within, a well-ventilated room, large and lofty,
•cheerful pavement of coloured tiles, a bar for serving out the
^eer, good supply of forms and chairs, and a brave big chim-
ney-corner, where the fire burns cheerfully. Adjoining this
room, another:
'Built for a reading-room,' said Friar Bacon ; 'but not much
used — yet.'
The dreary sage, looking in through the window, perceiving
a fixed reading-desk within, and inquiring its use:
'I have Service there,' said Friar Bacon. 'They never went
anywhere to hear prayers, and of course it would be hopeless
THE POOR MAN AND HIS BEER 217
to help them to be happier and better, if they had no religious
feeling at all.'
'The whole place is very pretty.' Thus the sage.
'I am glad you think so. I built it for the holders of the
Allotment-grounds, and gave it them : only requiring them to
manage it by a committee of their own appointing, and never
to get drunk there. They never have got drunk there.'
'Yet they have their beer freely?'
'O yes. As much as they choose to buy. The club gets
its beer direct from the brewer, by the barrel. So they get it
good; at once much cheaper, and much better, than at the
public-house. The members take it in turns to be steward,
and serve out the beer: if a man should decline to serve when
his turn came, he would pay a fine of twopence. The steward
lasts, as long as the barrel lasts. When there is a new bar-
rel, there is a new steward.'
'What a noble fire is roaring up that chimney !'
'Yes, a capital fire. Every member pays a halfpenny a
week.'
'Every member must be the holder of an Allotment-gar-
den?'
'Yes ; for which he pays five shillings a year. The Allot-
ments you see about us, occupy some sixteen or eighteen
acres, and each garden is as large as experience shows one
man to be able to manage. You see how admirably they are
tilled, and how much they get off them. They are always
working in them in their spare hours ; and when a man wants
a mug of beer, instead of going off to the village and the
public-house, he puts down his spade or his hoe, comes to the
club-house and gets it, and goes back to his work. When he
has done work, he likes to have his beer at the club, still, and
to sit and look at his little crops as they thrive.'
'They seem to manage the club very well.
'Perfectly well. Here are their own rules. They made
them. I never interfere with them, except to advise them
when they ask me.'
218 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
RULES AND REGULATIONS
MADE BY THE COMMITTEE,
From the 21st September, 1857.
One half-penny per week to be paid to the club by each member.
1. — Each member to draw the beer in order, according to the
number of his allotment; on failing, a forfeit of twopence to
be paid to the club.
2. — The member that draws the beer to pay for the same, and
bring his ticket up receipted when the subscriptions are paid; on
failing to do so, a penalty of sixpence to be forfeited and paid
to the club.
3. — Subscriptions and forfeits to be paid at the club-room on
the last Saturday night of each month.
4. — The subscriptions and forfeits to be cleared up every quar-
ter; if not, a penalty of sixpence to be paid to the club.
5. — The member that draws the beer to be at the club-room by
six o'clock every evening, and stay till ten; but in the event of
no member being there, he may leave at nine; on failing so to at-
tend, a penalty of sixpence to be paid to the club.
6. — Any member giving beer to a stranger in this club-room,
excepting to his wife or family, shall be liable to the penalty of
one shilling.
7. — Any member lifting his hand to strike another in this club-
room shall be liable to the penalty of sixpence.
8. — Any member swearing in this club-room shall be liable to
a penalty of twopence each time.
9. — Any member selling beer shall be expelled from the club.
10. — Any member wishing to give up his allotment, may apply
to the committee, and they shall value the crop and the condition
of the ground. The amount of the valuation shall be paid by
the succeeding tenant, who shall be allowed to enter on any
part of the allotment which is uncropped at the time of notice of
the leaving tenant.
11. — Any member not keeping his allotment-garden clear from
seed-weeds, or otherwise injuring his neighbours, may be turned
out of his garden by the votes of two-thirds of the committee,
one month's notice being given to him.
12. — Any member carelessly breaking a mug, is to pay the cost
of replacing the same.
I was soliciting the attention of Philosewers to some old
old bonnets hanging in the Allotment-gardens to frighten
the birds, and the fashion of which I should think would ter-
rify a French bird to death at any distance, when Philosewers
solicited my attention to the scrapers at the club-house door.
The amount of the soil of England which every member
brought there on his feet, was indeed surprising; and even I,
who am professedly a salad-eater, could have grown a salad
for my dinner, in the earth on any member's frock or hat.
'Now,' said Friar Bacon, looking at his watch, 'for the
Pig-clubs !'
The dreary Sage entreated explanation.
'Why, a pig is so very valuable to a poor labouring man,
and it is so very difficult for him at this time of the year to get
money enough to buy one, that I lend him a pound for the
purpose. But, I do it in this way. I leave such of the club
members as choose it and desire it, to form themselves into
parties of five. To every man in each company of five, I
lend a pound, to buy a pig. But, each man of the five be-
comes bound for every other man, as to the repayment of his
money. Consequently, they look after one another, and pick
out their partners with care ; selecting men in whom they have
confidence.'
'They repay the money, I suppose, when the pig is fat-
tened, killed, and sold?'
'Yes. Then they repay the money. And they do repay
it. I had one man, last year, who was a little tardy (he was
in the habit of going to the public-house) ; but even he did
pay. It is an immense advantage to one of these poor fel-
220 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
lows to have a pig. The pig consumes the refuse from the
man's cottage and Allotment-garden, and the pig's refuse en-
riches the man's garden besides. The pig is the poor man's
friend. Come into the club-house again.'
The poor man's friend. Yes. I have often wondered who
really was the poor man's friend among a great number of
competitors, and I now clearly perceive him to be the pig.
He never makes aay flourishes about the poor man. He never
gammons the poor man — except to his manifest advantage in
the article of bacon. He never comes down to this house, or
goes down to his constituents. He openly declares to the
poor man, 'I want my sty because I am a Pig. I desire to
have as much to eat as you can by any means stuff me with,
because I am a Pig. He never gives the poor man a sov-
ereign for bringing up a family. He never grunts the poor
man's name in vain. And when he dies in the odour of Pork-
ity, he cuts up, a highly useful creature and a blessing to the
poor man, from the ring in his snout to the curl in his tail.
Which of the poor man's other friends can say as much?
Where is the M. P. who means Mere Pork?
The dreary Sage had glided into these reflections, when he
found himself sitting by the club-house fire, surrounded by
green smock-frocks and shapeless hats: with Friar Bacon
lively, busy, and expert, at a little table near him.
'Now, then come. The first five!' said Friar Bacon.
*Where are you?'
'Order!' cried a merry-faced little man, who had brought
his young daughter with him to see life, and who always mod-
estly hid his face in his beer-mug after he had thus assisted
the business.
'John Nightingale, William Thrush, Joseph Blackbird,
Cecil Robin, and Thomas Linnet !' cried Friar Bacon.
'Here, sir!' and 'Here, sir!' And Linnet, Robin, Black-
bird, Thrush, and Nightingale, stood confessed.
We, the undersigned, declare, in effect, by this written pa-
per, that each of us is responsible for the repayment of this
pig-money by each of the other. 'Sure you understand,
Nightingale?'
'Ees, sur.'
THE POOR MAN AND HIS BEER 221
'Can you write your name, Nightingale?'
<Na, sur.'
Nightingale's eye upon his name, as Friar Bacon wrote it,
was a sight to consider in after years. Rather incredulous
was Nightingale, with a hand at the corner of his mouth, and
his head on one side, as to those drawings really meaning him.
Doubtful was Nightingale whether any virtue had gone out
of him in that committal to paper. Meditative was Nightin-
gale as to what would come of young Nightingale's growing
up to the acquisition of that art. Suspended was the interest
of Nightingale, when his name was done — as if he thought the
letters were only sown, to come up presently in some other
form. Prodigious, and wrong-handed was the cross made by
Nightingale on much encouragement — the strokes directed
from him instead of towards him ; and most patient and sweet-
humoured was the smile of Nightingale as he stepped back
into a general laugh.
'OR — der !' cried the little man. Immediately disappearing
into his mug
'Ralph Mangel, Roger Wurzel, Edward Vetches, Matthew
Carrot, and Charles Taters!' said Friar Bacon.
'All here, sir'
'You understand it, Mangel?'
'Iss, sir, I unnerstaans it.'
'Can you write your name, Mangel?'
'Iss, sir.'
Breathless interest. A dense background of smock-frocks
accumulated behind Mangel, and many eyes in it looked doubt-
fully at Friar Bacon, as who should say, 'Can he really
though?' Mangel put down his hat, retired a little to get a
good look at the paper, wetted his right hand thoroughly by
drawing it slowly across his mouth, approached the paper
with great determination, flattened it, sat down at it, and got
well to his work. Circuitous and sea-serpent-like, were the
movements of the tongue of Mangel while he formed the let-
ters ; elevated were the eyebrows of Mangel and sidelong the
eyes, as, with his left whisker reposing on his left arm, they
followed his performance ; many were the misgivings of Man-
gel, and slow was his retrospective meditation touching the
222 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
junction of the letter p with h; something too active was the
big forefinger of Mangel in its propensity to rub out without
proved cause. At last, long and deep was the breath drawn
by Mangel when he laid down the pen ; long and deep the
wondering breath drawn by the background — as if they had
watched his walking across the rapids of Niagara, on stilts,
and now cried, 'He has done it !'
But, Mangel was an honest man, if ever honest man lived.
'T'owt to be a hell, sir,' said he, contemplating his work, 'and
I ha' made a t on 't.'
The over-fraught bosoms of the background found relief
in a roar of laughter.
'Or — DER !' cried the little man. 'CHEER !' And after that
second word, came forth from his mug no more.
Several other clubs signed, and received their money. Very
few could write their names ; all who could not, pleaded that
they could not, more or less sorrowfully, and always with a
shake of the head, and in a lower voice than their natural
speaking voice. Crosses could be made standing ; signatures
must be sat down to. There was no exception to this rule.
Meantime, the various club-members smoked, drank their beer,
and talked together quite unrestrained. They all wore their
hats, except when they went up to Friar Bacon's table. The
merry-faced little man offered his beer, with a natural good-
fellowship, both to the Dreary one and Philosewers. Both
partook of it with thanks.
'Seven o'clock !' said Friar Bacon. 'And now we had bet-
ter get across to the concert, men, for the music will be be-
ginning.'
The concert was in Friar Bacon's laboratory ; a large build-
ing near at hand, in an open field. The bettermost people
of the village and neighbourhood were in a gallery on one
side, and, in a gallery opposite the orchestra. The whole
space below was filled with the labouring people and their
families, to the number of five or six hundred. We had been
obliged to turn away two hundred to-night, Friar Bacon said,
for want of room — and that, not counting the boys, of whom
we had taken in only a few picked ones, by reason of the
THE POOR MAN AND HIS BEER 223
boys, as a class, being given to too fervent a custom of ap-
plauding with their boot-heels.
The performers were the ladies of Friar Bacon's family,
and two gentlemen ; one of them, who presided, a Doctor of
Music. A piano was the only instrument. Among the vocal
pieces, we had a negro melody (rapturously encored), the
Indian Drum, and the Village Blacksmith ; neither did we
want for fashionable Italian, having Ah! non giunge, and
Mi manca la voce. Our success was splendid ; our good-hu-
moured, unaffected, and modest bearing, a pattern. As to the
audience, they were far more polite and far more pleased than
at the Opera ; they were faultless. Thus for barely an hour
the concert lasted, with thousands of great bottles looking on
from the walls, containing the results of Friar Bacon's Mil-
lion and one experiments in agricultural chemistry ; and con-
taining too, no doubt, a variety of materials with which the
Friar could have blown us all through the roof at five min-
utes' notice.
God save the Queen being done, the good Friar stepped
forward and said a few words, more particularly concerning
two points ; firstly, that Saturday half-holiday, which it would
be kind in farmers to grant; secondly, the additional Allot-
ment-grounds we were going to establish, in consequence of
the happy success of the system, but which we could not guar-
antee should entitle the holders to be members of the club, be-
cause the present members must consider and settle that ques-
tion for themselves: a bargain between man and man being
always a bargain, and we having made over the club to them
as the original Allotment-men. This was loudly applauded,
and so, with contented and affectionate cheering, it was all
over.
As Philosewers, and I the Dreary, posted back to Lon-
don, looking up at the moon and discussing it as a world pre-
paring for the habitation of responsible creatures, we ex-
patiated on the honour due to men in this world of ours who
try to prepare it for a higher course, and to leave the race
who live and die upon it better than they found them.
224 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
[SEPTEMBER 24, 1859]
THE existing Criminal Law has been found in trials for Mur-
der, to be so exceedingly hasty, unfair, and oppressive — in a
word, to be so very objectionable to the amiable persons ac-
cused of that thoughtless act — that it is, we understand, the
intention of the Government to bring in a Bill for its amend-
ment. We have been favoured with an outline of its probable
provisions.
It will be grounded on the profound principle that the
real offender is the Murdered Person ; but for whose obstinate
persistency in being murdered, the interesting fellow-creature
to be tried could not have got into trouble.
It leading enactments may be expected to resolve them-
selves under the following heads :
1. There shall be no Judge. Strong representations have
been made by highly popular culprits that the presence of this
obtrusive character is prejudicial to their best interests. The
Court will be composed of a political gentleman, sitting in a
secluded room commanding a view of St. James's Park, who
has already more to do than any human creature can, by any
stretch of the human imagination, be supposed capable of
doing.
2. The Jury to consist of Five Thousand Five Hundred
and Fifty-five Volunteers.
3. The Jury to be strictly prohibited from seeing either
the accused or the witnesses. They are not to be sworn.
They are on no account to hear the evidence. They are to
receive it, or such representations of it, as may happen to
fall in their way ; and they will constantly write letters about
it to all the Papers.
4. Supposing the trial to be a trial for Murder by poison-
ing, and supposing the hypothetical case, or the evidence, for
the prosecution to charge the administration of two poisons,
say Arsenic and Antimony ; and supposing the taint of
Arsenic in the body to be possible but not probable, and
NEW POINTS OF CRIMINAL LAW 225
the presence of Antimony in the body, to be an absolute cer-
tainty ; it will then become the duty of the Jury to confine
their attention solely to the Arsenic, and entirely to dismiss the
Antimony from their minds.
5. The symptoms preceding the death of the real offender
(or Murdered Person) being described in evidence by medical
practitioners who saw them, other medical practitioners who
never saw them shall be required to state whether they are
inconsistent with certain known diseases — but, they shall never
be asked whether they are not exactly consistent with the ad-
ministration of Poison. To illustrate this enactment in the
proposed Bill by a case: — A raging mad dog is seen to run
into the house where Z lives alone, foaming at the mouth. Z
and the mad dog are for some time left together in that
house under proved circumstances, irresistibly leading to the
conclusion that Z has been bitten by the dog. Z is after-
wards found lying on his bed in a state of hydrophobia, and
with the marks of the dog's teeth. Now, the symptoms of
that disease being identical with those of another disease
called Tetanus, which might supervene on Z's running a rusty
nail into a certain part of his foot, medical practitioners who
never saw Z, shall bear testimony to that abstract fact, and
it shall then be incumbent on the Registrar-General to certify
that Z died of a rusty nail.
It is hoped that these alterations in the present mode of pro-
cedure will not only be quite satisfactory to the accused per-
son (which is the first great consideration), but will also
tend, in a tolerable degree, to the welfare and safety of So-
ciety. For it is not sought in this moderate and prudent
measure to be wholly denied that it is an inconvenience to
Society to be poisoned overmuch.
226 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
LEIGH HUNT. A REMONSTRANCE
[DECEMBER 24, 1859]
'THE sense of beauty and gentleness, of moral beauty and
faithful gentleness, grew upon him as the clear evening
closed in. When he went to visit his relative at Putney, he
still carried with him his work, and the books he more immedi-
ately wanted. Although his bodily powers had been giving
way, his most conspicuous qualities, his memory for books,
and his affection remained ; and when his hair was white, when
his ample chest had grown slender, when the very proportion
of his height had visibly lessened, his step was still ready, and
his dark eyes brightened at every happy expression, and at
every thought of kindness. His death was simply exhaus-
tion : he broke off his work to lie down and repose. So gentle
was the final approach, that he scarcely recognised it till the
very last, and then it came without terrors. His physical
suffering had not been severe ; at the latest hour he said that
his only uneasiness was failing breath. And that failing
breath was used to express his sense of the inexhaustible kind-
ness he had received from the family who had been so unex-
pectedly made his nurses, — to draw from one of his sons, by
minute, eager, and searching questions, all that he could learn
about the latest vicissitudes and growing hopes of Italy, — to
ask the friends and children around him for news of those
whom he loved, — and to send love and messages to the absent
who loved him.'
Thus, with a manly simplicity and filial affection, writes the
eldest son of Leigh Hunt in recording his father's death.
These are the closing words of a new edition of The Autobi-
ography of Leigh Hunt, published by Messrs. Smith and
Elder, of Cornhill, revised by that son, and enriched with an
introductory chapter of remarkable beauty and tenderness.
The son's first presentation of his father to the reader, 'rather
tall, straight as an arrow, looking slenderer than he really
was ; his hair black and shining, and slightly inclined to
wave ; his head high, his forehead straight and white, his eyes
LEIGH HUNT. A REMONSTRANCE 227
black and sparkling, his general complexion dark ; in his whole
carriage and manner an extraordinary degree of life,' com-
pletes the picture. It is the picture of the flourishing and
fading away of man that is born of a woman and hath but a
short time to live.
In his presentation of his father's moral nature and intel-
lectual qualities, Mr. Hunt is no less faithful and no less
touching. Those who knew Leigh Hunt, will see the bright
face and hear the musical voice again, when he is recalled to
them in this passage : 'Even at seasons of the greatest depres-
sion in his fortunes, he always attracted many visitors, but
still not so much for any repute that attended him as for his
personal qualities. Few men were more attractive, in society,*
whether in a large company or over the fireside. His man-
ners were peculiarly animated; his conversation, varied, rang-
ing over a great field of subjects, was moved and called forth
by the response of his companion, be that companion philoso-
pher or student, sage or boy, man or woman ; and he was
equally ready for the most lively topics or for the gravest re-
flections— his expression easily adapting itself to the tone of
his companion's mind. With much freedom of manners, he
combined a spontaneous courtesy that never failed, and a con-
siderateness derived from a ceaseless kindness of heart that
invariably fascinated even strangers.' Or in this : 'His ani-
mation, his sympathy with what was gay and pleasurable ; his
avowed doctrine of cultivating cheerfulness, were manifest on
the surface, and could be appreciated by those who knew him
in society, most probably even exaggerated as salient traits,
on which he himself insisted with a sort of gay and ostenta-
tious wilfulness.'
The last words describe one of the most captivating pe-
culiarities of a most original and engaging man, better than
any other words could. The reader is besought to observe
them, for a reason that shall presently be given. Lastly;
'The anxiety to recognise the right of others, the tendency to
"refine," which was noted by an early school companion, and
the propensity to elaborate every thought, made him, along
with the direct argument by which he sustained his own con-
viction, recognise and almost admit all that might be said
228 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
on the opposite side.' For these reasons, and for others sug-
gested with equal felicity, and with equal fidelity, the son
writes of the father, 'It is most desirable that his qualities
should be known as they were ; for such deficiencies as he had
are the honest explanation of his mistakes ; while, as the reader
may see from his writings and his conduct, they are not, as the
faults of which he was accused would be, incompatible with
the noblest faculties both of head and heart. To know Leigh
Hunt as he was, was to hold him in reverence and love.
These quotations are made here, with a special object. It
is not, that the personal testimony of one who knew Leigh
Hunt well, may be borne to their truthfulness. It is not, that
it may be recorded in these pages, as in his son's introduc-
tory chapter, that his life was of the most amiable and do-
mestic kind, that his wants were few, that his way of life was
frugal, that he was a man of small expenses, no ostentations,
a diligent labourer, and a secluded man of letters. It is not,
that the inconsiderate and forgetful may be reminded of his
wrongs and sufferings in the days of the Regency, and of the
national disgrace of his imprisonment. It is not, that their
forbearance may be entreated for his grave, in right of his
graceful fancy or his political labours and endurances,
though —
Not only we, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past, not only we, that prate
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well.
It is, that a duty may be done in the most direct way possible.
An act of plain, clear duty.
Four or five years ago, the writer of these lines was much
pained by accidentally encountering a printed statement, 'that
Mr. Leigh Hunt was the original of Harold Skimpole in
Bleak Hou*e.' The writer of these lines, is the author of that
book. The statement came from America. It is no disre-
spect to that country, in which the writer has, perhaps, as
many friends and as true an interest as any man that lives,
good-humouredly to state the fact, that he has, now and then,
been the subject of paragraphs in Transatlantic newspapers,
more surprisingly destitute of all foundation in truth than
LEIGH HUNT. A REMONSTRANCE 229
the wildest delusion of the wildest lunatics. For reasons born
of this exerience, he let the thing go by.
But, since Mr. Leigh Hunt's death, the statement has been
revived in England. The delicacy and generosity envinced
in its revival, are for the rather late consideration of its re-
vivers. The fact is this:
Exactly those graces and charms of manner which are re-
membered in the words we have quoted, were remembered by
the author of the work of fiction, when he drew the character
in question. Above all other things, that 'sort of gay and
ostentatious wilfulness' in the humouring of a subject, which
had many a time delighted him, and impressed him as being
unspeakably whimsical and attractive, was the airy quality he
wanted for the man he invented. Partly for this reason, and
partly (he has since often grieved to think) for the pleasure
it afforded him to find that delightful manner reproducing
itself under his hand, he yielded to the temptation of too often
making the character speak like his old friend. He no more
thought, God forgive him ! that the admired original would
ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious
creature, than he has himself ever thought of charging the
blood of Desdemona and Othello, on the innocent Academy
model who sat for lago's leg in the picture. Even as to the
mere occasional manner, he meant to be so cautious and con^
scientious, that he privately referred the proof sheets of the
first number of that book to two intimate literary friends of
Leigh Hunt (both still living), and altered the whole of that
part of the text on their discovering too strong a resem-
blance to his 'way.'
He cannot see the son lay this wreath on the father's tomb,
and leave him to the possibility of ever thinking that the
present words might have righted the father's memory and
were left unwritten. He cannot know that his own son may
have to explain his father when folly or malice can wound his
heart no more, and leave this task undone.
230 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
THE TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER
[DECEMBEE 81, 1859]
THE pen is taken in hand on the present occasion, by a pri-
vate individual (not wholly unaccustomed to literary compo-
sition), for the exposure of a conspiracy of a most frightful
nature ; a conspiracy which, like the deadly Upas-tree of Java,
on which the individual produced a poem in his earlier youth
(not wholly devoid of length), which was so flatteringly re-
ceived (in circles not wholly unaccustomed to form critical
opinions), that he was recommended to publish it, and would
certainly have carried out the suggestion, but for private
considerations (not wholly unconnected with expense).
The individual who undertakes the exposure of the gigantic
conspiracy now to be laid bare in all its hideous deformity,
is an inhabitant of the town of Tattlesnivel — a lowly inhabi-
tant, it may be, but one who, as an Englishman and a man,
will ne'er abase his eye before the gaudy and the mocking
throng.
Tattlesnivel stoops to demand no championship from her
sons. On an occasion in History, our bluff British monarch,
our Eighth Royal Harry, almost went there. And long ere
the periodical in which this exposure will appear, had sprung
into being, Tattlesnivel had unfurled that standard which yet
waves upon her battlements. The standard alluded to, is
THE TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER, containing the latest intelli-
gence, and state of markets, down to the hour of going to
press, and presenting a favourable local medium for adver-
tisers, on a graduated scale of charges, considerably diminish-
ing in proportion to the guaranteed number of insertions.
It were bootless to expatiate on the host of talent engaged
in formidable phalanx to do fealty to the Bleater. Suffice
it to select, for present purposes, one of the most gifted and
(but for the wide and deep ramifications of an un-English
conspiracy), most rising, of the men who are bold Albion's
pride. It were needless, after this preamble, to point the
THE TATTLESXIVEL BLEATER 231
finger more directly at the LONDON CORRESPONDENT OF THE
TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER.
On the weekly letters of that Correspondent, on the flexi-
bility of their English, on the boldness of their grammar, on
the originality of their quotations (never to be found as they
are printed, in any book existing), on the priority of their
information, on their intimate acquaintance with the secret
thoughts and unexecuted intentions of men, it would ill be-
come the humble Tattlesnivellian who traces these words, to
dwell. They are graven in the memory; they are on the
Bleater's file. Let them be referred to.
But, from the infamous, the dark, the subtle conspiracy
which spreads its baleful roots throughout the land, and of
which the Bleater's London Correspondent is the one sole sub-
ject, it is the purpose of the lowly Tattlesnivellian who un-
dertakes this revelation, to tear the veil. Nor will he shrink
from his self-imposed labour, Herculean though it be.
The conspiracy begins in the very Palace of the Sovereign
Lady of our Ocean Isle. Leal and loyal as it is the proud
vaunt of the Bleater's readers, one and all, to be, the inhabi-
tant who pens this exposure does not personally impeach,
either her Majesty the queen, or the illustrious Prince Con-
sort. But, some silken-clad smoothers, some purple parasites,
some fawners in frippery, some greedy and begartered ones in
gorgeous garments, he does impeach — ay, and wrathf ully !
Is it asked on what grounds? They shall be stated.
The Bleater's London Correspondent, in the prosecution
of his important inquiries, goes down to Windsor, sends in
his card, has a confidential interview with her Majesty and the
illustrious Prince Consort. For a time, the restraints- of
Royalty are thrown aside in the cheerful conversation of the
Bleater's London Correspondent, in his fund of information,
in his flow of anecdote, in the atmosphere of his genius; her
Majesty brightens, the illustrious Prince Consort thaws, the
cares of State and the conflicts of Party are forgotten,
lunch is proposed. Over that unassuming and domestic table,
her Majesty communicates to the Bleater's London Cor-
respondent that it is her intention to send his Royal High-
232 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
ness the Prince of Wales to inspect the top of the Great
Pyramid — thinking it likely to improve his acquaintance with
the views of the people. Her Majesty further communicates
that she has made up her royal mind (and that the Prince
Consort has made up his illustrious mind) to the bestowal of
the vacant Garter, let us say on Mr. Roebuck. The younger
Royal children having been introduced at the request of the
Bleater's London Correspondent, and having been by him
closely observed to present the usual external indications of
good health, the happy knot is severed, with a sigh the Royal
bow is once more strung to its full tension, the Bleater's Lon-
don Correspondent returns to London, writes his letter, and
tells the Tattlesnivel Bleater what he knows. All Tattlesnivel
reads it, and knows that he knows it. But, does his Royal
Highness the Prince of Wales ultimately go to the top of
the Great Pyramid? Does Mr. Roebuck ultimately get the
Garter? No. Are the younger Royal children even ulti-
mately found to be well? On the contrary, they have — and
on that very day had — the measles. Why is this? Because
the conspiratiors against the Bleater's London Correspondent
have stepped in with their dark machinations. Because her
Majesty and the Prince Consort are artfully induced to
change their minds, from north to south, from east to
west, immediately after it is known to the conspirators that
they have put themselves in communication with the
Bleater's London Correspondent. It is now indignantly
demanded, by whom they are so tampered with? It is now
indignantly demanded, who took the responsibility of conceal-
ing the indisposition of those Royal children from their Royal
and Illustrious parents, and of bringing them down from
their beds, disguised, expressly to confound the London
Correspondent 'of the Tattlesnivel Bleater? Who are
those persons, it is again asked? Let not rank and favour
protect them. Let the traitors be exhibited in the face of
day!
Lord John Russell is in this conspiracy. Tell us not that
his Lordship is a man of too much spirit and honour. De-
nunciation is hurled against him. The proof? The proof
is here.
THE TATTLE SNIVEL BLEATER 233
The Time is panting for an answer to the question, Will
Lord John Russell consent to take office under Lord Palm-
erston? Good. The London Correspondent of the Tat-
tlesnivel Bleater is in the act of writing his weekly letter,
finds himself rather at a loss to settle this question finally,
leaves off, puts his hat on, goes down to the lobby of the
House of Commons, sends in for Lord John Russell, and
has him out. He draws his arm through his Lordship's,
takes him aside, and says, 'John, will you ever accept office
under Palmerston?' His Lordship replies, 'I will not.' The
Bleater's London Correspondent retorts, with the caution
such a man is bound to use, 'John, think again ; say nothing
to me rashly; is there any temper here?' His Lordship
replies, calmly, 'None whatever.' After giving him time
for reflection, the Bleater's London Correspondent says,
'Once more, John, let me put a question to you. Will you
ever accept office under Palmerston?' His Lordship answers
(note the exact expressions), 'Nothing shall induce me,
ever to accept a seat in a Cabinet of which Palmerston is
the Chief.' They part, the London Correspondent of the
Tattlesnivel Bleater finishes his letter, and — always being
withheld by motives of delicacy, from plainly divulging
his means of getting accurate information on every subject,
at first hand — puts in it, this passage: 'Lord John Russell
is spoken of, by blunderers, for Foreign Affairs; but I
have the best reasons for assuring your readers, that' (giv-
ing prominence to the exact expressions, it will be observed)
' "NOTHING WILL, EVER INDUCE HIM, TO ACCEPT A SEAT IN
A CABINET OF WHICH PALMERSTON is THE CHIEF." On this
you may implicitly rely.' What happens? On the very
day of the publication of that number of the Bleater — the
malignity of the conspirators being even manifested in
the selection of the day — Lord John Russell takes the For-
eign Office ! Comment were superfluous.
The people of Tattlesnivel will be told, have been told,
that Lord John Russell is a man of his word. He may be,
on some occasions; but, when overshadowed by this dark
and enormous growth of conspiracy, Tattlesnivel knows him
to be otherwise. 'I happen to be certain, deriving my in-
234 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
formation from a source which cannot be doubted to be
authentic,' wrote the London Correspondent of the Bleater,
within the last year, 'that Lord John Russell bitterly regrets
having made that explicit speech of last Monday.' These
are not roundabout phrases ; these are plain words. What
does Lord John Russell (apparently by accident), within
eight-and-forty hours after their diffusion over the civilised
globe? Rises in his place in Parliament, and unblushingly
declares that if the occasion could arise five hundred times,
for his making that very speech, he would make it five hun-
dred times! Is there no conspiracy here? And is this com-
bination against one who would be always right if he were
not proved always wrong, to be endured in a country that
boasts of its freedom and its fairness?
But, the Tattlesnivellian who now raises his voice against
intolerable oppression, may be told that, after all, this is
a political conspiracy. He may be told, forsooth, that Mr.
Disraeli's being in it, that Lord Derby's being in it, that Mr.
Bright's being in it, that every Home, Foreign, and Colonial
Secretary's being in it, that every ministry's and every
opposition's being in it, are but proofs that men will do
in politics what they would do in nothing else. Is this the
plea? If so, the rejoinder is, that the mighty conspiracy
includes the whole circle of Artists of all kinds, and com-
prehends all degrees of men, down to the worst criminal and
the hangman who ends his career. For, all these are inti-
mately known to the London Correspondent of the Tattle-
snivel Bleater, and all these deceive him.
Sir, put it to the proof. There is the Bleater on the file
— documentary evidence. Weeks, months, before the Ex-
hibition of the Royal Academy, the Bleater's London Cor-
respondent knows the subjects of all the leading pictures,
knows what the painters first meant to do, knows what they
afterwards substituted for what they first meant to do, knows
what they ought to do and won't do, knows what they ought
not to do and will do, knows to a letter from whom they
have commissions, knows to a shilling how much they are to be
paid. Now, no sooner is each studio clear of the remarkable
man to whom each studio-occupant has revealed himself as he
THE TATTLESXIVEL BLEATER 235
does not reveal himself to his nearest and dearest bosom friend,
than conspiracy and fraud begin. Alfred the Great be-
comes the Fairy Queen; Moses viewing the Promised Land,
turns out to be Moses going to the Fair; Portrait of His
Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, is transformed, as if
by irreverent enchantment of the dissenting interest, into A
Favourite Terrier, or Cattle Grazing; and the most extra-
ordinary work of art in the list described by the Bleater, is
coolly sponged out altogether, and asserted never to have
had existence at all, even in the most shadowy thoughts of
its executant ! This is vile enough, but this is not all. Pic-
ture-buyers then come forth from their secret positions, and
creep into their places in the assassin-multitude of conspira-
tors. Mr. Baring, after expressly telling the Bleater's Lon-
don Correspondent that he had bought No. 39 for one
thousand guineas, gives it up to somebody unknown for a
couple of hundred pounds ; The Marquis of Lansdowne pre-
tends to have no knowledge whatever of the commissions to
which the London Correspondent of the Bleater swore him,
but allows a Railway Contractor to cut him out for half
the money. Similar examples might be multiplied. Shame,
shame, on these men! Is this England?
Sir, look again at Literature. The Bleater's London Cor-
respondent is not merely acquainted with all the eminent
writers, but is in possession of the secrets of their souls. He
is versed in their hidden meanings and references, sees their
manuscripts before publication, and knows the subjects and
titles of their books when they are not begun. How dare
those writers turn upon the eminent man and depart from
every intention they have confided to him? How do they
justify themselves in entirely altering their manuscripts,
changing their titles, and abandoning their subjects? Will
they deny, m the face of Tattlesnivel, that they do so? If
they have such hardihood, let the file of the Bleater strike
them dumb. By their fruits they shall be known. Let their
works be compared with the anticipatory letters of the
Bleater's London Correspondent, and their falsehood and
deceit will become manifest as the sun ; it will be seen that
they do nothing which they stand pledged to the Bleater's
236 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
London Correspondent to do; it will be seen that they are
among the blackest parties in this black and base conspiracy.
This will become apparent, sir, not only as to their public
proceedings but as to their private affairs. The outraged
Tattlesnivellian who now drags this infamous combination
into the face of day, charges those literary persons with mak-
ing away with their property, imposing on the Income Tax
Commissioners, keeping false books, and entering into sham
contracts. He accuses them on the unimpeachable faith of
the London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater. With
whose evidence they will find it impossible to reconcile their
own account of any transaction of their lives.
The national character is degenerating under the influence
of the ramifications of this tremendous conspiracy. For-
gery is committed, constantly. A person of note — any
sort of person of note — dies. The Bleater's London
Correspondent knows what his circumstances are, what his
savings are (if any), who his creditors are, all about
his children and relations, and (in general, before his body
is cold) describes his will. Is that will ever proved?
Never! Some other will is substituted; the real instrument,
destroyed. And this (as has been before observed), is
England !
Who are the workmen and artificers, enrolled upon
the books of this treacherous league? From what funds
are they paid, and with what ceremonies are they sworn to
secrecy? Are there none such? Observe what follows. A
little time ago the Bleater's London Correspondent had
this passage: 'Boddleboy is pianoforte playing at St.
Januarius's Gallery, with pretty tolerable success ! He
clears three hundred pounds per night. Not bad this !'
The builder of St. Januarius's Gallery (plunged to the
throat in the conspiracy) met with this piece of news, and
observed, with characteristic coarseness, 'that the Bleater's
London Correspondent was a Blind Ass.' Being pressed
by a man of spirit to give his reasons for this extra-
ordinary statement, he declared that the Gallery, crammed
to suffocation, would not hold two hundred pounds, and
that its expenses were, probably, at least half what it
THE TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER 237
did hold. The man of spirit (himself a Tattlesnivellian)
had the Gallery measured within a week from that hour, and
it would not hold two hundred pounds! Now, can the
poorest capacity doubt that it had been altered in the mean-
time?
And so the conspiracy extends, through every grade of
society,, down to the condemned criminal in prison, the hang-
man, and the Ordinary. Every famous murderer within the
test ten years has desecrated his last moments by falsifying
his confidences imparted specially to the London Corre-
spondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater; on every such
occasion, Mr. Calcraft has followed the degrading example;
and the reverend Ordinary, forgetful of his cloth, and
mindful only (it would seem, alas!) of the conspiracy, has
committed himself to some account or other of the criminal's
demeanour and conversation, which has been diametrically
opposed to the exclusive information of the London Corre-
spondent of the Bleater. And this (as has been before
observed) is Merry England!
A man of true genius, however, is not easily defeated.
The Bleater's London Correspondent, probably beginning
to suspect the existence of a plot against him, has recently
fallen on a new style, which, as being very difficult to coun-
termine, may necessitate the organisation of a new con-
spiracy. One of his masterly letters, lately, disclosed the
adoption of this style — which was remarked with profound
sensation throughout Tattlesnivel — in the following passage:
'Mentioning literary small talk, I may tell you that some
new and extraordinary rumours are afloat concerning the
conversations I have previously mentioned, alleged to have
taken place in the first floor front (situated over the street
door), of Mr. X. Ameter (the poet so well known to your
readers), in which, X. Ameter's great uncle, his second son.
his butcher, and a corpulent gentleman with one eye univer-
sally respected at Kensington, are said not to have been on
the most friendly footing ; I forbear, however, to pursue the
subject further, this week, my informant not being able to
supply me with exact particulars.'
But, enough, sir. The inhabitant of Tattlesnivel who has
238 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
taken in hand to expose this odious association of unprinci-
pled men against a shining (local) character, turns from it
with disgust and contempt. Let him in few words strip the
remaining flimsy covering from the nude object of the con-
spirators, and his loathsome task is ended.
Sir, that object, he contends, is evidently twofold.
First, to exhibit the London Correspondent of the Tat-
tlesnivel Bleater in the light of a mischievous Blockhead who,
by hiring himself out to tell what he cannot possibly know,
is as great a public nuisance as a Blockhead in a corner can be.
Second, to suggest to the men of Tattlesnivel that it does
not improve their town to have so much Dry Rubbish shot
there.
Now, sir, on both these points Tattlesnivel demands in
accents of Thunder, Where is the Attorney General? Why
doesn't the Times take it up? (Is the latter in the con-
spiracy ? It never adopts his views, or quotes him, and inces-
santly contradicts him.) Tattlesnivel, sir, remembering
that our forefathers contended with the Norman at Hast-
ings, and bled at a variety of other places that will readily
occur to you, demands that its birthright shall not be bartered
away for a mess of pottage. Have a care, sir, have a care !
Or Tattlesnivel (its idle Rifles piled in its scouted streets)
may be seen ere long, advancing with its Bleater to the foot
of the Throne, and demanding redress for this conspiracy,
from the orbed and sceptred hands of Majesty itself 1
THE YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY
[MARCH 1, 1862]
A SONG of the hour, now in course of being sung and whistled
in every street, the other day reminded the writer of these
words — as he chanced to pass a fag-end of the song for the
twentieth time in a short London walk — that twenty years
ago, a little book on the United States, entitled American
Notes, was published by 'a Young Man from the Country,'
who had just seen and left it.
MAN FROM THE COUNTRY 239
This Young Man from the Country fell into a deal of
trouble, by reason of having taken the liberty to believe
that he perceived in America downward popular tendencies
for which his young enthusiasm had been anything but pre-
pared. It was in vain for the Young Man to offer in ex-
tenuation of his belief that no stranger could have set foot
on those shores with a feeling of livelier interest in the coun-
try, and stronger faith in it, than he. Those were the days
when the Tories had made their Ashburton Treaty, and
when Whigs and Radicals must have no theory disturbed.
All three parties waylaid and mauled the Young Man from
the Country, and snowed that he knew nothing about the
country.
As the Young Man from the Country had observed in
the Preface to his little book, that he 'could bide his time,'
he took all this in silent part for eight years. Publishing
then, a cheap edition of his book, he made no stronger protest
than the following:
'My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves
whether the influences and tendencies which I distrusted
in America, have any existence but in my imagination. They
can examine for themselves whether there has been anything
in the public career of that country during these past eight
years, or whether there is anything in its present position,
&t home or abroad, which suggests that those influences and
tendencies really do exist. As they find the fact, they will
judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-doing,
in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge
that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such
thing, they will consider me altogether mistaken. I have
nothing to defend, or to explain away. The truth is the
truth ; and neither childish absurdities, nor unscupulous con-
tradictions, can make it otherwise. The earth would still
move round the sun, though the whole Catholic Church said
No.'
Twelve more years having since passed away, it may, now
at last, be simply just towards the Young Man from the
240 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Country, to compare what he originally wrote, with recent
events and their plain motive powers. Treating of the
House of Representatives at Washington, he wrote thus :
'Did I recognise in this assembly, a body of men, who,
applying themselves in a new world to correct some of the
falsehoods and vices of the old, purified the avenues to
Public Life, paved the dirty ways to Place and Power, de-
bated and made laws for the Common Good, and had no party
but their Country?
'I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion
of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever
wrought. Despicable trickery at elections ; under-handed
tamperings with public officers ; cowardly attacks upon
opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired
pens for daggers ; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves,
whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week
they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which
are the dragon's teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness ;
aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popu-
lar mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences:
such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in
its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out
from every corner of the crowded hall.
'Did I see among them, the intelligence and refinement : the
true, honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there,
were drops of its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured
the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for
profit and for pay. It is the game of these men, and of
their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so
fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in
worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall
be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle
out their selfish views unchecked. And thus this lowest of
all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other coun-
tries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire
to make the laws, do here recoil the farthest from that deg-
radation.
'That there are, among the representatives of the people
MAN FROM THE COUNTRY 241
in both Houses, and among all parties, some men of high
character and great abilities, I need not say. The fore-
most among those politicians who are known in Europe,
have been already described, and I see no reason to depart
from the rule I have laid down for my guidance, of
abstaining from all mention of individuals. It will be
sufficient to add, that to the most favourable accounts that
have been written of them, I fully and most heartily sub-
scribe; and that personal intercourse and free communica-
tion have bred within me, not the result predicted in the
very doubtful proverb, but increased admiration and respect.'
Towards the end of his book, the Young Man from the
Country thus expressed himself concerning its people:
'They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and
affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance
their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the
possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable
degree, which renders an educated American one of the most
endearing and most generous of friends. I never was so
won upon, as by this class; never yielded up my full con-
fidence and esteem so readily and pleasurably, as to them ;
never can make again, in half a year, so many friends for
whom I seem to entertain the regard of half a life.
'These qualities are natural, I implicitly believe, to the
whole people. That they are, however, sadly sapped and
blighted in their growth among the mass ; and that there
are influences at work which endanger them still more, and
give but little present promise of their healthy restoration ;
is a truth that ought to be told.
'It is an essential part of every national character to pique
itself mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its
virtue or its wisdom from their very exaggeration. One
great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the pro-
lific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal
Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon
this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to per-
ceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it, in spite of
242 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity and
acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and
independence.
' "You carry," says the stranger, "this jealousy and dis-
trust into every transaction of public life. By repelling
worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up
a class of candidates for the suffrage, who, in their every act,
disgrace your Institutions and your people's choice. It has
rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your in-
constancy has passed into a proverb ; for you no sooner set
up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash
it into fragments: and this, because directly you reward a
benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely
because he is rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to
find out, either that you have been too bountiful in your
acknowledgments, or he remiss in his deserts. Any man who
attains a high place among you, from the President down-
wards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any
printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate
directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals
at once to your distrust, and is believed. You will
strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence,
however fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow
a whole caravan of camels, if they be laden with unworthy
doubts and mean suspicions. Is this well, think you, or likely
to elevate the character of the governors or the governed,
among you?"
'The answer is invariably the same: "There's freedom of
opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself,
and we are not to be easily overreached. That *s how. our
people come to be suspicious."
'Another prominent feature is the love of "smart" dealing :
which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust ;
many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a
knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a
halter: though it has not been without its retributive opera-
tion, for this smartness has done more in a few years to im-
pair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources,
than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a
MAN FROM THE COUNTRY 243
century. The merits of a broken speculation, or a bank-
ruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its
or his observance of the golden rule, "Do as you would be
done by," but are considered with reference to their
smartness. I recollect, on both occasions of our passing
that ill-fated Cairo on the Mississippi, remarking on the bad
effects such gross deceits must have when they exploded, in
generating a want of confidence abroad, and discouraging
foreign investment: but I was given to understand that
this was a very smart scheme by which a deal of money had
been made: and that its smartest feature was, that they
forgot these things abroad, in a very short time, and specu-
lated again, as freely as ever. The following dialogue I
have held a hundred times : "Is it not a very disgraceful cir-
cumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be acquir-
ing a large property by the most infamous and odious
means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has
been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your citizens?
He is a public nuisance, is he not?" "Yes, sir." "A con-
victed liar?" "Yes, sir." "He has been kicked, and
cuffed, and caned?" "Yes, sir." "And he is utterly dis-
honourable, debased, and profligate?" "Yes, sir." "In the
name of wonder, then, what is his merit?" "Well, sir, he
is a smart man."
'But the foul growth of America has a more tangled root
than this ; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.
'Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South;
pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores
of thousands ; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed,
temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in
all other forms walk through the land with giant strides ; but
while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its pres-
ent abject state, high moral improvement in that country is
hopeless. Year by year, it must. and will go back; year by
year, the tone of public opinion must sink lower down; year
by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less
account before all decent men ; and .year by year, the memory
of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged
more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.
244 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
'Among the herd of journals which are published in the
States, there are some, the reader scarcely need be told, of
character and credit. From personal intercourse with
accomplished gentlemen connected with publications of this
class, I have derived both pleasure and profit. But the name
of these is Few, and of the others Legion; and the influence
of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison of
the bad.
'Among the gentry of America; among the well-informed
and moderate ; in the learned professions ; at the bar and on
the bench ; there is, as there can be, but one opinion, in refer-
ence to the vicious character of these infamous journals. It
is sometimes contended — I will not say strangely, for it is
natural to seek excuses for such a disgrace — that their influ-
ence is not so great as a visitor would suppose. I must be
pardoned for saying that there is no warrant for this plea,
and that every fact and circumstance tends directly to the
opposite conclusion.
'When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or
character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter
what, in America, without first grovelling down upon the
earth, and bending the knee before this monster of depravity ;
when any private excellence is safe from its attacks ; when
any social confidence is left unbroken by it, or any tie of
social decency and honour is held in the least regard ; when
any man in that Free Country has freedom of opinion, and
presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, with-
out humble reference to a censorship which, for its rampant
ignorance and base dishonesty, he utterly loaths and despises
in his heart ; when those who most acutely feel its infamy
and the reproach it casts upon the nation, and who most
denounce it to each other, dare to set their heels upon, and
crush it openly, in the sight of all men : then, I will believe
that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their
manly senses. But while that Press has its evil eye in every
house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state,
from a president to a postman ; while, with ribald slander
for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an
enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper.
AN ENLIGHTENED CLERGYMAN 245
or they will not read at all ; so long must its odium be upon
the country's head, and so long must the evil it works, be
plainly visible in the Republic.'
The foregoing was written in the year eighteen hundred
and forty-two. It rests with the reader to decide whether
it has received any confirmation, or assumed any colour of
truth, in or about the year eighteen hundred and sixty-two.
AN ENLIGHTENED CLERGYMAN
[MARCH 8, 1862]
AT various places in Suffolk (as elsewhere) penny readings
take place 'for the instruction and amusement of the lower
classes.' There is a little town in Suffolk called Eye, where
the subject of one of these readings was a tale (by Mr.
Wilkie Collins) from the last Christmas Number of this
Journal, entitled 'Picking Up Waifs at Sea.' It appears
that the Eye gentility was shocked by the introduction of
this rude piece among the taste and musical glasses of that
important town, on which the eyes of Europe are notoriously
always fixed. In particular, the feelings of the vicar's family
were outraged; and a Local Organ (say, the Tattlesnivel
Bleater) consequently doomed the said piece to everlasting
oblivion, as being of an 'injurious tendency!'
When this fearful fact came to the knowledge of the un-
happy writer of the doomed tale in question, he covered his
face with his robe, previous to dying decently under the
sharp steel of the ecclesiastical gentility of the terrible town
of Eye. But the discovery that he was not alone in hi?
gloomy glory, revived him, and he still lives.
For, at Stowmarket, in the aforesaid county of Suffolk, at
another of those penny readings, it was announced that a
certain juvenile sketch, culled from a volume of sketches (by
Boz) and entitled 'The Bloomsbury Christening,' would be
read. Hereupon, the clergyman of that place took heart
246 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
and pen, and addressed the following terrific epistle to a
gentleman bearing the very appropriate name of Gudgeon :
STOWMARKET VICARAGE, Feb. 25, 1861.
SIR, — My attention has been directed to a piece called 'The
Bloomsbury Christening' which you propose to read this even-
ing. Without presuming to claim any interference in the ar-
rangement of the readings, I would suggest to you whether you
have on this occasion sufficiently considered the character of the
composition you have selected. I quite appreciate the laudable
motive of the promoters of the readings to raise the moral tone
amongst the working class of the town and to direct this taste
in a familiar and pleasant manner. 'The Bloomsbury Christen-
ing' cannot possibly do this. It trifles with a sacred ordinance,
and the language and style, instead of improving the taste, has
a direct tendency to lower it.
I appeal to your right feeling whether it is desirable to give
publicity to that which must shock several of your audience, and
create smile amongst others, to be indulged in only by violating
the conscientious scruples of their neighbours.
The ordinance which is here exposed to ridicule is one which
is much misunderstood and neglected amongst many families be-
longing to the Church of England, and the mode in which it is
treated in this chapter cannot fail to appear as giving a sanction
to, or at least excusing, such neglect.
Although you are pledged to the public to give this subject,
yet I cannot but believe that they would fully justify your
substitution of it for another did they know the circumstances.
An abridgment would only lessen the evil in a degree, as it is
not only the style of the writing but the subject itself which is
objectionable.
Excuse me for troubling you, but I felt that, in common with
yourself, I have a grave responsibility in the matter, and I am
most truly yours,
r. is. COLES.
To Mr. J. Gudgeon.
It is really necessary to explain that this is not a bad joke.
It is simply a bad fact.
RATHER A STRONG DOSE 247
RATHER A STRONG DOSE
[MARCH 21, 1863]
'DOCTOR JOHN CAMPBELL, the minister of the Tabernacle
Chapel, Finsbury, and editor of the British Banner, etc., with
that massive vigour which distinguishes his style,' did, we
are informed by Mr. Howitt, 'deliver a verdict in the Banner,
for November, 1852,' of great importance and favour to the
Table-rapping cause. We are not informed whether the
Public, sitting in judgment on the question, reserved any
point in this great verdict for subsequent consideration; but
the verdict would seem to have been regarded by a perverse
generation as not quite final, inasmuch as Mr. Howitt finds
it necessary to re-open the case, a round ten years afterwards,
in nine hundred and sixty-two stiff octavo pages, published
by Messrs. Longman and Company.
Mr. Howitt is in such a bristling temper on the Super-
natural subject, that we will not take the great liberty of
arguing any point with him. But — with the view of assist-
ing him to make converts — we will inform our readers, on
his conclusive authority, what they are required to believe;
premising what may rather astonish them in connexion with
their views of a certain historical trifle, called The Reforma-
tion, that their present state of unbelief is all the fault of
Protestantism, and that 'it is high time, therefore, to protest
against Protestantism.'
They will please to believe, by way of an easy beginning,
all the stories of good and evil demons, ghosts, prophecies,
communication with spirits, and practice of magic, that ever
obtained, or are said to have ever obtained, in the North, in
the South, in the East, in the West, from the earliest and
darkest ages, as to which we have any hazy intelligence, real
or supposititious, down to the yet unfinished displacement of
the red men in North America. They will please to believe
that nothing in this wise was changed by the fulfilment of
Our Saviour's mission upon earth; and further, that what
Saint Paul did, can be done again, and has been done again.
248 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
As this is not much to begin with, they will throw in at this
point rejection of Faraday and Brewster, and 'poor Paley,'
and implicit acceptance of those shining lights, the Reverend
Charles Beecher, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
('one of the most vigorous and eloquent preachers of Amer-
ica'), and the Reverend Adin Ballou.
Having thus cleared the way for a healthy exercise of
faith, our advancing readers will next proceed especially to
believe in the old story of the Drummer of Tedworth, in the
inspiration of George Fox, in 'the spiritualism, prophecies,
and prevision' of Huntington the coal-porter (him who
prayed for the leather breeches which miraculously fitted
him), and even in the Cock Lane Ghost. They will please
wind up, before fetching their breath, with believing that
there is a close analogy between rejection of any such plain
and proved facts as those contained in the whole foregoing
catalogue, and the opposition encountered by the inventors
of railways, lighting by gas, microscopes and telescopes, and
vaccination. This stinging consideration they will always
carry rankling in their remorseful hearts as they advance.
As touching the Cock Lane Ghost, our conscience-stricken
readers will please particularly to reproach themselves for
having ever supposed that important spiritual manifestation
to have been a gross imposture which was thoroughly de-
tected. They will please to believe that Dr. Johnson be-
lieved in it, and that, in Mr. Howitt's words, he 'appears to
have had excellent reasons for his belief.' With a view to
this end, the faithful will be so good as to obliterate from
their Boswells the following passage : 'Many of my readers,
I am convinced, are to this hour under an impression that
Johnson was thus foolishly deceived. It will therefore sur-
prise them a good deal when they are informed upon un-
doubted authority that Johnson was one of those by whom
the imposture was detected. The story had become so pop-
ular, that he thought it should be investigated, and in this
research he was assisted by the Rev. Dr. Douglas, now Bishop
of Salisbury, the great detector of impostures' — and there-
fore tremendously obnoxious to Mr. Howitt — 'who informs
me that after the gentlemen who went and examined into the
RATHER A STRONG DOSE 249
evidence were satisfied of its falsity, Johnson wrote in their
presence an account of it, which was published in the news-
papers and Gentleman's Magazine, and undeceived the world.'
But as there will still remain another highly inconvenient pas-
sage in the Boswells of the true believers, they must likewise
be at the trouble of cancelling the following also, referring
to a later time: 'He (Johnson) expressed great indignation
at the imposture of the Cock Lane Ghost, and related with
much satisfaction how he had assisted in detecting the cheat,
and had published an account of it in the newspapers.'
They will next believe (if they be, in the words of Captain
Bobadil, 'so generously minded') in the transatlantic trance-
speakers 'who professed to speak from direct inspiration,'
Mrs. Cora Hatch, Mrs. Henderson, and Miss Emma Har-
dinge ; and they will believe in those eminent ladies having
'spoken on Sundays to five hundred thousand hearers' — small
audiences, by the way, compared with the intelligent con-
course recently assembled in the city of New York, to do
honor to the Nuptials of General the Honourable T. Barnum
Thumb. At about this stage of their spiritual education,
they may take the opportuniy of believing in 'letters from a
distinguished gentleman of New York, in which the frequent
appearance of the gentleman's deceased wife and of Dr.
Franklin, to him and other well-known friends, are unques-
tionably unequalled in the annals of the marvellous.' Why
these modest appearances should seem at all out of the com-
mon way to Mr. Howitt (who would be in a state of flaming
indignation if we thought them so), we could not imagine,
until we found on reading further, 'it is solemnly stated that
the witnesses have not only seen but touched these spirits, and
handled the clothes and hair of Franklin.' Without presum-
ing to go Mr. Howitt's length of considering this by any
means a marvellous experience, we yet venture to confess that
it has awakened in our mind many interesting speculations
touching the present whereabout in space, of the spirits of
Mr. Howitt's own departed boots and hats.
The next articles of belief are Belief in the moderate figures
of 'thirty thousand media in the United States in 1853' ; and
in two million five hundred thousand spiritualists in the same
250
country of composed minds, in 1855, 'professing to have ar~
rived at their convictions of spiritual communication from
personal experience' ; and in 'an average rate of increase of
three hundred thousand per annum,' still in the same country
of calm philosophers. Belief in spiritual knockings, in all
manner of American places, and, among others, in the house
of 'a Doctor Phelps at Stratford, Connecticut, a man of the
highest character for intelligence,' says Mr. Howitt, and to
whom we willingly concede the possession of far higher in-
telligence than was displayed by his spiritual knocker, in
'frequently cutting to pieces the clothes of one of his boys,'
and in breaking 'seventy-one panes of glass' — unless, indeed,
the knocker, when in the body, was connected with the tailor-
ing and glazing interests. Belief in immaterial performers
playing (in the dark though: they are obstinate about its
being in the dark) on material instruments of wood, catgut,
brass, tin, and parchment. Your belief is further requested
in 'the Kentucky Jerks.' The spiritual achievements thus
euphoniously denominated 'appear,' says Mr. Howitt, 'to have
been of a very disorderly kind.' It appears that a certain
Mr. Doke, a Presbyterian clergyman, 'was first seized by the
jerks,' and the jerks laid hold of Mr. Doke in that unclerical
way and with that scant respect for his cloth, that they
'twitched him about in a most extraordinary manner, often
when in the pulpit, and caused him to shout aloud, and run
out of the pulpit into the woods, screaming like a madman.
When the fit was over, he returned calmly to his pulpit and
finished the service.' The congregation having waited, we
presume, and edified themselves with the distant bellowing?
of Doke in the woods, until he came back again, a little warm
and hoarse, but otherwise in fine condition. 'People were often
seized at hotels, and at table would, on lifting a glass to drink,
jerk the liquor to the ceiling; ladies would at the breakfast-
table suddenly be compelled to throw aloft their coffee, and
frequently break the cup and saucer.' A certain venturesome
clergyman vowed that he would preach down the Jerks, 'but
he was seized in the midst of his attempt, and made so ridicu-
lous that he withdrew himself from further notice' — an exam-
ple much to be commended. That same favoured land of
RATHER A STRONG DOSE 251
America has been particularly favoured in the development
of 'innumerable mediums,' and Mr. Howitt orders you to be-
lieve in Daniel Dunglas Home, Andrew Davis Jackson, and
Thomas L. Harris, as 'the three most remarkable, or most fa-
miliar, on this side of the Atlantic.' Concerning Mr. Home,
the articles of belief (besides removal of furniture) are, That
through him raps have been given and communications made
from deceased friends. That 'his hand has been seized by
spirit influence, and rapid communications written out, of a
surprising character to those to whom they were addressed.'
That at his bidding, 'spirit hands have appeared which have
been seen, felt, and recognised frequently, by persons present,
as those of deceased friends.' That he has been frequently
lifted up and carried, floating 'as it were' through a room,
near the ceiling. That in America, 'all these phenomena have
displayed themselves in greater force than here' — which we
have not the slightest doubt of. That he is 'the planter
of spiritualism all over Europe.' That 'by circumstances that
no man could have devised, he became the guest of the Em-
peror of the French, of the King of Holland, of the Czar of
Russia, and of many lesser princes.' That he returned from
'this unpremeditated missionary tour,' 'endowed with com-
petence' ; but not before, 'at the Tuileries, on one occasion
when the emperor, empress, a distinguished lady, and him-
self only were sitting at table, a hand appeared, took up a
pen, and wrote, in a strong and well-known character, the word
Napoleon. The hand was then successively presented to the
several personages of the party to kiss.' The stout believer,
having disposed of Mr. Home, and rested a little, will then
proceed to believe in Andrew Davis Jackson, or Andrew Jack-
son Davis (Mr. Howitt, having no Medium at hand to settle
this difference and reveal the right name of the seer, calls him
by both names), who merely 'beheld all the essential natures
of things, saw the interior of men and animals, as perfectly
as their exterior; and described them in language so correct,
that the most able technologists could not surpass him. He
pointed out the proper remedies for all the complaints, and the
shops where they were to be obtained' ; — in the latter respect
appearing to hail from an advertising circle, as we conceive.
252 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
It was also in this gentleman's limited department to 'see the
metals in the earth,' and to have 'the most distant regions and
their various productions present before him.' Having
despatched this tough case, the believer will pass on to Thomas
L. Harris, and will swallow him easily, together with 'whole
epics' of his composition ; a certain work 'of scarcely less than
Miltonic grandeur, called The Lyric of the Golden Age' — a
lyric pretty nigh as long as one of Mr. Hewitt's volumes —
dictated by Mr. (not Mrs.) Harris to the publisher in ninety-
four hours ; and several extempore sermons, possessing the re-
markably lucid property of being 'full, unforced, out-gush-
ing, unstinted, and absorbing.' The candidate for examina-
tion in pure belief, will then pass on to the spirit-photography
department ; this, again, will be found in so-favoured America,
under the superintendence of Medium Mumler, a photographer
of Boston: who was 'astonished' (though, on Mr. Howitt's
showing, he surely ought not to have been) 'on taking a pho-
tograph of himself, to find also by his side the figure of a
young girl, which he immediately recognised as that of a de-
ceased relative. The circumstance made a great excitement.
Numbers of persons rushed to his rooms, and many have found
deceased friends photographed with themselves.' (Perhaps
Mr. Mumler, too, may become 'endowed with competence' in
time. Who knows?) Finally, the true believers in the gos-
pel according to Howitt, have, besides, but to pin their faith
on 'ladies who see spirits habitually,' on ladies who know they
have a tendency to soar in the air on sufficient provocation,
and on a few other gnats to be taken after their camels, and
they shall be pronounced by Mr. Howitt not of 'the stereo-
typed class of minds,' and not partakers of 'the astonishing
ignorance of the press,' and shall receive a first-class certificate
of merit.
But before they pass through this portal into the Tem-
ple of Serene Wisdom, we, halting blind and helpless on the
steps, beg to suggest to them what they must at once and for
ever disbelieve. They must disbelieve that in the dark times,
when very few were versed in what are now the mere recrea-
tions of Science, and when those few formed a priesthood-
class apart, any marvels were wrought by the aid of concave
RATHER A STRONG DOSE 253
mirrors and a knowledge of the properties of certain odours
and gases, although the self-same marvels could be repro-
duced before their eyes at the Polytechnic Institution, Regent
Street, London, any day in the year. They must by no means
believe that Conjuring and Ventriloquism ,are old trades.
They must disbelieve all Philosophical Transactions contain-
ing the records of painful and careful inquiry into now fa-
miliar disorders of the senses of seeing and hearing, and into
the wonders of somnambulism, epilepsy, hysteria, miasmatic
influence, vegetable poisons derived by whole communities
from corrupted air, diseased imitation, and moral infection.
They must disbelieve all such awkward leading cases as the
case of the Woodstock Commissioners and their man, and the
case of the identity of the Stockwell Ghost, with the maid-
servant. They must disbelieve the vanishing of champion
haunted houses (except, indeed, out of Mr. Hewitt's book),
represented to have been closed and ruined for years, before
one day's inquiry by four gentlemen associated with this Jour-
nal, and one hour's reference to the Local Rate-books. They
must disbelieve all possibility of a human creature on the last
verge of the dark bridge from Life to Death, being mysteri-
ously able, in occasional cases, so to influence the mind of one
very near and dear, as vividly to impress that mind with some
disturbed sense of the solemn change impending. They must
disbelieve the possibility of the lawful existence of a class of
intellects which, humbly conscious of the illimitable power of
GOD and of their own weakness and ignorance, never deny that
He can cause the souls of the dead to revisit the earth, or that
He may have caused the souls of the dead to revisit the earth,
or that He can cause any awful or wondrous thing
to be; but to deny the likelihood of apparitions or spirits
coming here upon the stupidest of bootless errands, and pro-
ducing credentials tantamount to a solicitation of our vote
and interest and next proxy, to get them into the Asylum for
Idiots. They must disbelieve the right of Christian people
who do not protest against Protestantism, but who hold it to
be a barrier against the darkest superstitions that can enslave
the soul, to guard with jealousy all approaches tending down
to Cock Lane Ghosts and such-like ir famous swindles, widely
254 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
degrading when widely believed in ; and they must disbelieve
that such people have the right to know, and that it is their
duty to know, wonder-workers by their fruits, and to test
miracle-mongers by the tests of probability, analogy, and
common sense. , They must disbelieve all rational explanations
of thoroughly proved experiences (only) which appear super-
natural, derived from the average experience and study of
the visible world. They must disbelieve the speciality of the
Master and the Disciples, and that it is a monstrosity to test
the wonders of the show-folk by the same touchstone. Lastly,
they must disbelieve that one of the best accredited chapters
in the history of mankind is the chapter that records the aston-
ishing deceits continually practised, with no object or purpose
but the distorted pleasure of deceiving.
We have summed up a few — not nearly all — of the articles
of belief and disbelief to which Mr. Howitt most arrogantly
demands an implicit adherence. To uphold these, he uses a
book as a Clown in a Pantomime does, and knocks everybody
on the head with it who comes in his way. Moreover, he is
an angrier personage than the Clown, and does not experi-
mentally try the effect of his red-hot poker on your shins, but
straightway runs you through the body and soul with it. He
is always raging to tell you that if you are not Howitt, you
are Atheist and Anti-Christ. He is the sans-culotte of the
Spiritual Revolution, and will not hear of your accepting
this point and rejecting that; — down your throat with them
all, one and indivisible, at the point of the pike ; No Liberty,
Totality, Fraternity, or Death !
Without presuming to question that 'it is high time to pro-
test against Protestantism' on such very substantial grounds
as Mr. Howitt sets forth, we do presume to think that it is
high time to protest against Mr. Howitt's spiritualism, as
being a little in excess of the peculiar merit of Thomas L.
Harris's sermons, and somewhat too 'full, out-gushing, un-
stinted, and absorbing.'
THE MARTYR MEDIUM 255
THE MARTYR MEDIUM
[APRIL 4, 1863]
'AFTER the valets, the master !' is Mr. Fechter's rallying cry
in the picturesque romantic drama which attracts all London
to the Lyceum Theatre. After the worshippers and puffers
of Mr. Daniel Dunglas Home, the spirit medium, comes Mr.
Daniel Dunglas Home himself, in one volume. And we must,
for the honour of Literature, plainly express our great sur-
prise and regret that he comes arm-in-arm with such good
company as Messrs. Longman and Company.
We have already summed up Mr. Home's demands on the
public capacity of swallowing, as sounded through the war-
denouncing trumpet of Mr. Howitt, and it is not our inten-
tion to revive the strain as performed by Mr- Home on his
own melodious instrument. We notice, by the way, that in
that part of the Fantasia where the hand of the first Na-
poleon is supposed to be reproduced, recognised, and kissed,
at the Tuileries, Mr. Home subdues the florid effects one
might have expected after Mr. Howitt's execution, and brays
in an extremely general manner. And yet we observe Mr.
Home to be in other things very reliant on Mr. Howitt, of
whom he entertains as gratifying an opinion as Mr. Howitt
entertains of him: dwelling on his 'deep researches into this
subj ect,' and of his 'great work now ready for the press,' and
of his 'eloquent and forcible' advocacy, and eke of his 'elab-
orate and almost exhaustive work,' which Mr. Home trusts
will be 'extensively read.' But, indeed, it would seem to be
the most reliable characteristic of the Dear Spirits, though
very capricious in other particulars, that they always form
their circles into what may be described, in worldly terms, as
A Mutual Admiration and Complimentation Company (Lim-
ited).
Mr. Home's book is entitled Incidents m My Life. We
will extract a dozen sample passages from it, as variations on
and phrases of harmony in, the general strain for the Trum-
pet, which we have promised not to repeat.
256 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
1. ME. HOME IS SUPERNATURALLY NURSED
'I cannot remember when first I became subject to the
curious phenomena which have now for so long attended me,
but my aunt and others have told me that when I was a baby
my cradle was frequently rocked, as if some kind guardian
was attending me in my slumbers.'
2. DISRESPECTFUL CONDUCT OF MR. HOMfi's AUNT NEVER-
THELESS
'In her uncontrollable anger she seized a chair and threw it
at me.' •:»]
3. PUNISHMENT OF MR. HOME'S AUNT
'Upon one occasion as the table was being thus moved about
of itself, my aunt brought the family Bible, and placing it on
the table, said, "There, that will soon drive the devils away" ;
but to her astonishment the table only moved in a more lively
manner, as if pleased to bear such a burden.' (We believe
this is constantly observed in pulpits and church reading
desks, which are invariably lively.) 'Seeing this she was
greatly incensed, and determined to stop it, she angrily placed
her whole weight on the table, and was actually lifted up with
it bodily from the floor.'
4- TRIUMPHANT EFFECT OF THIS DISCIPLINE ON MR. HOME'S
AUNT
'And she felt it a duty that I should leave her house, and
which I did.'
5. MR. HOME'S MISSION
It was communicated to him by the spirit of his mother,
in the following terms: 'Daniel, fear not, my child, God is
with you, and who shall be against you? Seek to do good:
be truthful and truth-loving, and you will prosper, my child.
Yours is a glorious mission — you will convince the infidel,
cure the sick, and console the weeping.' It is a coincidence
that another eminent man, with several missions, heard a voice
THE MARTYR MEDIUM 257
from the Heavens blessing him, when he also was a youth,
and saying, 'You will be rewarded, my son, in time.' This
Medium was the celebrated Baron Munchausen, who relates
the experience in the opening of the second chapter of the in-
cidents of his life.
6. MODEST SUCCESS OF MR. HOME'S MISSION
'Certainty these phenomena, whether from God or from the
devil, have in ten years caused more converts to the great
truths of immortality and angel communion, with all that
flows from these great facts, than all the sects in Christendom
have made during the same period.'
7. WHAT THE FIRST COMPOSERS SAY OF THE SPIRIT-MUSIC,
TO MR. HOME
'As to the music, it has been my good fortune to be on in-
timate terms with some of the first composers of the day, and
more than one of them have said of such as they have heard,
that it is such music as only angels could make, and no man
could write it.'
These 'first composers' are not more particularly named.
We shall therefore be happy to receive and file at the office
of this Journal, the testimonials in the foregoing terms of
Dr. Sterndale Bennett, Mr. Balfe, Mr. Macfarren, Mr. Bene-
dict, Mr. Vincent Wallace, Signor Costa, M. Auber, M. Gou-
nod, Signor Rossini, and Signor Verdi. We shall also feel
obliged to Mr. Alfred Mellon, who is no doubt constantly
studying this wonderful music, under the Medium's auspices,
if he will note on paper, from memory, say a single sheet of
the same. Signor Giulio Regondi will then perform it, as cor-
rectly as a mere mortal can, on the Accordion, at the next
ensuing concert of the Philharmonic Society ; on which occa-
sion the before-mentioned testimonials will be conspicuously
displayed in the front of the orchestra.
8. MR. HOME'S MIRACULOUS INFANT
'On the 26th April, old style, or 8th May, according to
our style, at seven in the evening, and as the snow was fast
258
falling, our little boy was born at the town house, situate on
the Gagarines Quay, in St. Petersburg, where we were still
staying. A few hours after his birth, his mother, the nurse,
and I heard for several hours the warbling of a bird as if
singing over him. Also that night, and for two or three
nights afterwards, a bright starlike light, which was clearly
visible from the partial darkness of the room, in which there
was only a night-lamp burning, appeared several times di-
rectly over its head, where it remained for some moments, and
then slowly moved in the direction of the door, where it dis-
appeared. This was also seen by each of us at the same time.
The light was more condensed than those which have been so
often seen in my presence upon previous and subsequent occa-
sions. It was brighter and more distinctly globular. I do
not believe that it came through my mediumship, but rather
through that of the child, who has manifested on several occa-
sions the presence of the gift. I do not like to allude to such
a matter, but as there are more strange things in Heaven and
earth than are dreamt of, even in my philosophy, I do not
feel myself at liberty to omit stating, that during the latter
part of my wife's pregnancy, we thought it better that she
should not join in Seances, because it was found that when-
ever the rappings occurred in the room, a simultaneous move-
ment of the child was distinctly felt, perfectly in unison with
the sounds. When there were three sounds, three movements
were felt, and so on, and when five sounds were heard, which
is generally the call for the alphabet, she felt the five internal
movements, and she would frequently, when we were mistaken
in the latter, correct us from what the child indicated.'
We should ask pardon of our readers for sullying our pa-
per with this nauseous matter, if without it they could ade-
quately understand what Mr. Home's book is.
9- CAGLIOSTRO's SPIRIT CALLS ON MR. HOME
Prudently avoiding the disagreeable question of his giving
himself, both in this state of existence and in his spiritual cir-
cle, a name to which he never had any pretensions whatever,
and likewise prudently suppressing any reference to his amia-
THE MARTYR MEDIUM 259
ble weaknesses as a swindler and an infamous trafficker in his
own wife, the guileless Mr. Balsamo delivered, in a 'distinct
voice,' this distinct celestial utterance — unquestionably punc-
tuated in a supernatural manner: 'My power was that of a
mesmerist, but all-misunderstood by those about me, my bi-
ographers have even done me injustice, but I care not for the
untruths of earth.'
10. ORACULAR STATE OF MR. HOME
'After various manifestations, Mr. Home went into the
trance, and addressing a person present, said, "You ask what
good are such trivial manifestations, such as rapping, table-
moving, etc.? God is a better judge than we are what is
fitted for humanity, immense results may spring from trivial
things. The steam from a kettle is a small thing, but look
at the locomotive! The electric spark from the back of a
cat is a small thing, but see the wonders of electricity ! The
raps are small things, but their results will lead you to the
Spirit- World, and to eternity! Why should great results
spring from such small causes? Christ was born in a man-
ger, he was not born a King. When you tell me why he was
born in a manger, I will tell you why these manifestations, so
trivial, so undignified as they appear to you, have been ap-
pointed to convince the world of the truth of spiritualism."
Wonderful ! Clearly direct Inspiration ! — And yet, per-
haps, hardly worth the trouble of going 'into the trance' for,
either. Amazing as the revelation is, we seem to have heard
something like it from more than one personage who was wide
awake. A quack doctor, in an open barouche (attended by
a barrel-organ and two footmen in brass helmets), delivered
just such another address within our hearing, outside a gate
of Paris, not two months ago.
11. THE TESTIMONY OF MR. HOME'S BOOTS
'The lady of the house turned to me and said abruptly,
"Why, you are sitting in the air" ; and on looking, we found
that the chair remained in its place, but that I was elevated
two or three inches above it, and my feet not touching the
260 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
floor. This may show how utterly unconscious I am at times
to the sensation of levitation. As is usual, when I had not
got above the level of the heads of those about me, and when
they change their position much — as they frequently do in
looking wistfully at such a phenomenon — I came down again,
but not till I had remained so raised about half a minute from
the time of its being first seen. I was now impressed to leave
the table, and was soon carried to the lofty ceiling. The
Count de B left his place at the table, and coming under
where I was, said, "Now, young Home, come and let me touch
your feet." I told him I had no volition in the matter, but
perhaps the spirits would kindly allow me to come down to
him. They did so, by floating me down to him, and my feet
were soon in his outstretched hands. He seized my boots,
and now I was again elevated, he holding tightly, and pulling
at my feet, till the boots I wore, which had elastic sides, came
off and remained in his hands.'
12. THE UNCOMBATIVE NATURE OF ME. HOME
As there is a maudlin complaint in this book, about men
of Science being hard upon 'the "Orphan" Home,' and as the
'gentle and uncombative nature* of this Medium in a martyred
point of view is pathetically commented on by the anony-
mous literary friend who supplies him with an introduction
and appendix — rather at odds with Mr. Howitt, who is so
mightily triumphant about the same Martyr's reception by
crowned heads, and about the competence he has become en-
dowed with — we cull from Mr. Home's book one or two little
illustrative flowers. Sir David Brewster (a pestilent unbe-
liever) 'has come before the public in few matters which have
brought more shame upon him than his conduct and assertions
on this occasion, in which he manifested not only a disregard
for truth, but also a disloyalty to scientific observation, and
to the use of his own eyesight and natural faculties.' The
same unhappy Sir David Brewster's 'character may be the bet-
ter known, not only for his untruthful dealing with this sub-
ject, but also in his own domain of science in which the same
unfaithfulness to truth will be seen to be the characteristic of
THE MARTYR MEDIUM 261
his mind.' Again, he 'is really not a man over whom victory
is any honour.' Again, 'not only he, but Professor Fara-
day have had time and ample leisure to regret that they should
have so foolishly pledged themselves,' etc. A Faraday a fool
in the sight of a Home ! That unjust judge and whited wall,
Lord Brougham, has his share of this Martyr Medium's un-
combativeness. 'In order that he might not be compelled to
deny Sir David's statements, he found it necessary that he
should be silent, and I have some reason to complain that his
Lordship preferred sacrificing me to his desire not to immo-
late his friend.' M. Arago also came off with very doubt-
ful honours from a wrestle with the uncombative Martyr;
who is perfectly clear (and so are we, let us add) that sjcien-
tific men are not the men for his purpose. Of course, he is
the butt of 'utter and acknowledged ignorance,' and of 'the
most gross and foolish statements,' and of 'the unjust and
dishonest,' and of 'the press-gang,' and of crowds of other
alien and combative adjectives, participles, and substantives.
Nothing is without its use, and even this odious book may
do some service. Not because it coolly claims for the writer
and his disciples such powers as were wielded by the Saviour
and the Apostles ; not because it sees no difference between
twelve table rappers in these days, and twelve fishermen' in
those ; not because it appeals for precedents to statements ex-
tracted from the most ignorant and wretched of mankind,
by cruel torture, and constantly withdrawn when the torture
was withdrawn ; not because it sets forth such a strange con-
fusion of ideas as is presented by one of the faithful when,
writing of a certain sprig of geranium handed by an invisible
hand, he adds in ecstasies, 'which we have planted and it if
growing, so that it is no delusion, no fairy money turned into
dross or leaves' — as if it followed that the conjuror's half-
crowns really did become invisible and in that state fly, because
he afterwards cuts them out of a real orange; or as if the
conjuror's pigeon, being after the discharge of his gun, a real
live pigeon fluttering on the target, must therefore con-
clusively be a pigeon, fired, whole, living and unshattered, out
of the gun! — not because of the exposure of any of these
weaknesses, or a thousand such, are these moving incidents in
262 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the life of the Martyr Medium, and similar productions, likely
to prove useful, but because of their uniform abuse of those
who go to test the reality of these alleged phenomena, and
who came away incredulous. There is an old homely proverb
concerning pitch and its adhesive character, which we hope
this significant circumstance may impress on many minds.
The writer of these lines has lately heard overmuch touching
young men of promise in the imaginative arts, 'towards whom'
Martyr Mediums assisting at evening parties feel themselves
'drawn.' It may be a hint to such young men to stick to
their own drawing, as being of a much better kind, and to
leave Martyr Mediums alone in their glory.
As there is a good deal in these books about 'lying spirits,'
we will conclude by putting a hypothetical case. Supposing
that a Medium (Martyr or otherwise) were established for a
time in the house of an English gentleman abroad ; say, some-
where in Italy. Supposing that the more marvellous the
Medium became, the more suspicious of him the lady of the
house became. Supposing that the lady, her distrust once
aroused, were particularly struck by the Medium's exhibiting
a persistent desire to commit her, somehow or other, to the
disclosure of the manner of the death, to him unknown, of a
certain person. Supposing that she at length resolved to
test the Medium on this head, and, therefore, on a certain
evening mentioned a wholly supposititious manner of death
(which was not the real manner of death, nor anything at all
like it) within the range of his listening ears. And supposing
that a spirit presently afterwards rapped out its presence,
claiming to be the spirit of that deceased person, and claim-
ing to have departed this life in that supposititious way.
Would that be a lying spirit? Or would it be a something
else, tainting all that Medium's statements and suppressions,
even if they were not in, themselves of a manifestly outrageous
character?
THE LATE MR. STANFIELD 263
THE LATE MR. STANFIELD
[JUNE 1, 1867]
EVERY Artist, be he writer, painter, musician, or actor,
must bear his private sorrows as he best can, and must sep-
arate them from the exercise of his public pursuit. But it
sometimes happens, in compensation, that his private loss of
a dear friend represents a loss on the part of the whole com-
munity. Then he may, without obtrusion of his individuality,
step forth to lay his little wreath upon that dear friend's
grave.
On Saturday, the eighteenth of this present month, Clark-
son Stanfield died. On the afternoon of that day, England
lost the great marine painter of whom she will be boastful
ages hence ; the National Historian of her speciality, the Sea ;
the man famous in all countries for his marvellous rendering
of the waves that break upon her shores, of her ships and
seamen, of her coasts and skies, of her storms and sunshine,
of the many marvels of the deep. He who holds the oceans
in the hollow of His hand had given, associated with them,
wonderful gifts into his keeping; he had used them well
through threescore and fourteen years ; and, on the afternoon
of that spring day, relinquished them for ever.
It is superfluous to record that the painter of 'The Battle
of Trafalgar,' of the ^Victory being towed into Gibraltar
with the body of Nelson on Board,' of 'The Morning after
the Wreck,' of 'The Abandoned,' of fifty more such works,
died in his seventy-fourth year, 'Mr.' Stanfield. — He was an
Englishman.
Those grand pictures will proclaim his powers while paint
and canvas last. But the writer of these words had been his
friend for thirty years ; and when, a short week or two before
his death, he laid that once so skilful hand upon the writer's
breast and told him they would meet again, 'but not here,'
the thoughts of the latter turned, for the time, so little to his
noble genius, and so much to his noble nature !
He was the soul of frankness, generosity, and simplicity.
264 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
The most genial, the most affectionate, the most loving, and
the most lovable of men. Success had never for an instant
spoiled him. His interest in the Theatre as an Institution —
the best picturesqueness of which may be said to be wholly
due to him — was faithful to the last. His belief in a Play,
his delight in one, the ease with which it moved him to tears or
to laughter, were most remarkable evidences of the heart he
must have put into his old theatrical work, and of the thor-
ough purpose and sincerity with which it must have been
done. The writer was very intimately associated with him in
some amateur plays ; and day after day, and night after
night, there were the same unquenchable freshness, enthusi-
asm, and impressibility in him, though broken in health, even
then.
No Artist can ever have stood by his art with a quieter dig-
nity than he always did. Nothing would have induced him
to lay it at the feet of any human creature. To fawn, or to
toady, or to do undeserved homage to any one, was an abso-
lute impossibility with him. And yet his character was so
nicely balanced that he was the last man in the world to be
suspected of self-assertion, and his modesty was one of his
most special qualities.
He was a charitable, religious, gentle, truly good man. A
genuine man, incapable of pretence or of concealment. He
had been a sailor once; and all the best characteristics that
are popularly attributed to sailors, being his, and being in
him refined by the influenes of his Art, formed a whole not
likely to be often seen. There is no smile that the writer can
recall, like his ; no manner so naturally confiding and so cheer-
fully engaging. When the writer saw him for the last time
on earth, the smile and the manner shone out once through
the weakness, still: the bright unchanging Soul within the
altered face and form.
No man was ever held in higher respect by his friends, and
yet his intimate friends invariably addressed him and spoke of
him by a pet name. It may need, perhaps, the writer's mem-
ory and associations to find in this a touching expression of
his winning character, his playful smile, and pleasant ways.
'You know Mrs. Inchbald's story, Nature and Art?' wrote
A SLIGHT QUESTION OF FACT 265
Thomas Hood, once, in a letter : 'What a fine Edition of Na-
ture and Art is Stanfield!'
Gone! And many and many a dear old day gone with
him ! But their memories remain. And his memory will not
soon fade out, for he has set his mark upon the restless wa-
ters, and his fame will long be sounded in the roar of the sea.
A SLIGHT QUESTION OF FACT
[FEBRUARY 13, 1869]
IT is never well for the public interest that the originator of
any social reform should be soon forgotten. Further, it is
neither wholesome nor right (being neither generous nor just)
that the merit of his work should be gradually transferred
elsewhere.
Some few weeks ago, our contemporary, the Pall Matt
Gazette, in certain strictures on our Theatres which we are
very far indeed from challenging, remarked on the first ef-
fectual discouragement of an outrage upon decency which
the lobbies and upper-boxes of even our best Theatres habitu-
ally paraded within the last twenty or thirty years. From
those remarks it might appear as though no such Manager
of Covent Garden or Drury Lane as Mr. Macready had ever
existed.
It is a fact beyond all possibility of question, that Mr.
Macready, on assuming the management of Covent Garden
Theatre in 1837, did instantly set himself, regardless of
precedent and custom down to that hour obtaining, rigidly
to suppress this shameful thing, and did rigidly suppress and
crush it during his whole management of that theatre, and
during his whole subsequent management of Drury Lane.
That he did so, as certainly without favour as without fear;
that he did so, against his own immediate interests ; that he
did so, against vexations and oppositions which might have
cooled the ardour of a less earnest man, or a less devoted
artist; can be better known to no one than the writer of the
present words, whose name stands at the head of these pages.
266 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
LANDOR'S LIFE
[JULY 24, 1869]
PREFIXED to the second volume of Mr. Forster's admirable
biography of Walter Savage Landor,1 is an engraving from
a portrait of that remarkable man when seventy-seven years
of age, by Boxall. The writer of these lines can testify that
the original picture is a singularly good likeness, the result
of close and subtle observation on the part of the painter;
but, for this very reason, the engraving gives a most inade-
quate idea of the merit of the picture and the character of
the man.
From the engraving, the arms and hands are omitted. In
the picture, they are, as they were in nature, indispensable to
a correct reading of the vigorous face. The arms were very
peculiar. They were rather short, and were curiously re-
strained and checked in their action at the elbows ; in the ac-
tion of the hands, even when separately clenched, there was
the same kind of pause, and a noticeable tendency to relaxa-
tion on the part of the thumb. Let the face be never so in-
tense or fierce, there was a commentary of gentleness in the
hands, essential to be taken along with it. Like Hamlet,
Landor would speak daggers but use none. In the expres-
sion of his hands, though angrily closed, there was always
gentleness and tenderness; just as when they were open, and
the handsome old gentleman would wave them with a little
courtly flourish that sat well upon him, as he recalled some
classic compliment that he had rendered to some reigning
Beauty, there was a chivalrous grace about them such as
pervades his softer verses. Thus, the fictitious Mr. Boy-
thorn (to whom we may refer without impropriety in this
connexion, as Mr. Forster does) declaims 'with unimaginable
energy' the while his bird is 'perched upon his thumb,' and
he 'softly smooths its feathers with his forefinger.'
From the spirit of Mr. Forster's Biography these charac-
i Walter Savage Landor: a Biography, by John Forster, 2 vols. Chap-
man and Hall.
LANDOR'S LIFE 267
teristic hands are never omitted, and hence (apart from its
literary merits) its great value. As the same masterly
writer's Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith is a generous
and yet conscientious picture of a period, so this is a not
less generous and yet conscientious picture of one life; of
a life, with all its aspirations, achievements, and disappoint-
ments; all its capabilities, opportunities, and irretrievable
mistakes. It is essentially a sad book, and herein lies proof
of its truth and worth. The life of almost any man
possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself;
and this book enables us not only to see its subject, but to
be its subject, if we will.
Mr. Forster is of opinion that 'Lander's fame very surely
awaits him.' This point admitted or doubted, the value of
the book remains the same. It needs not to know his works
(otherwise than through his biographer's exposition), it
needs not to have known himself, to find a deep interest in
these pages. More or less of their warning is in every
conscience; and some admiration of a fine genius, and of
a great, wild, generous nature, incapable of mean self-
extenuation or dissimulation — if unhappily incapable of
self-repression too — should be in every breast. 'There may
be still living many persons,' Walter Lander's brother,
Robert, writes to Mr. Forster of this book, 'who would
contradict any narrative of yours in which the best quali-
ties were remembered, the worst forgotten.' Mr. Forster's
comment is: 'I had not waited for this appeal to resolve,
that, if this memoir were written at all, it should contain,
as far as might lie within my power, a fair statement of
the truth.' And this eloquent passage of truth immedi-
ately follows: 'Few of his infirmities are without some-
thing kindly or generous about them; and we are not long
in discovering there is nothing so wildly incredible that he
will not himself in perfect good faith believe. When he
published his first book of poems on quitting Oxford, the
profits were to be reserved for a distressed clergyman.
When he published his Latin poems, the poor of Leipzig
were to have the sum they realised. When his comedy
was ready to be acted, a Spaniard who had sheltered him at
268 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Castro was to be made richer by it. When he competed
for the prize of the Academy of Stockholm, it was to go
to the poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything from
any one of these enterprises, the fault at all events was not
his. With his extraordinary power of forgetting dis-
appointments, he was prepared at each successive failure to
start afresh, as if each had been a triumph. I shall have
to delineate this peculiarity as strongly in the last half as
in the first half of his life, and it was certainly an amiable
one. He was ready at all times to set aside, out of his own
possessions, something for somebody who might please him
for the time; and when frailties of temper and tongue are
noted, this other eccentricity should not be omitted. He
desired eagerly the love as well as the good opinion of those
whom for the time he esteemed, and no one was more affec-
tionate while under such influences. It is not a small virtue
to feel such genuine pleasure, as he always did in giving
and receiving pleasure. His generosity, too, was bestowed
chiefly on those who could make small acknowledgment in
thanks and no return in kind.'
Some of his earlier contemporaries may have thought him
a vain man. Most assuredly he was not, in the common
acceptation of the term. A vain man has little or no admira-
tion to bestow upon competitors. Landor had an inexhausti-
ble fund. He thought well of his writings, or he would not
have preserved them. He said and wrote that he thought
well of them, because that was his mind about them, and he
said and wrote his mind. He was one of the few men of
whom you might always know the whole: of whom you
might always know the worst, as well as the best. He had
no reservations or duplicities. 'No, by Heaven !' he would
say ('with unimaginable energy'), if any good adjective were
coupled with him which he did not deserve: 'I am nothing
of the kind. I wish I were; but I don't deserve the
attribute, and I never did, and I never shall!' His intense
consciousness of himself never led to his poorly excusing
himself, and seldom to his violently asserting himself.
When he told some little story of his bygone social ex-
periences, in Florence, or where not, as he was fond of
LANDOR'S LIFE 269
doing, it took the innocent form of making all the interlocu-
tors, Landors. It was observable, too, that they always
called him 'Mr. Landor' — rather ceremoniously and submis-
sively. There was a certain 'Caro Padre Abate Marina' —
invariably so addressed in these anecdotes — who figured
through a great many of them, and who always expressed
himself in this deferential tone.
Mr. Forster writes of Lander's character thus :
'A man must be judged, at first, by what he says and
does. But with him such extravagance as I have referred
to was little more than the habitual indulgence (on such
themes) of passionate feelings and language, indecent indeed
but utterly purposeless; the mere explosion of wrath pro-
voked by tyranny or cruelty ; the irregularities of an over-
heated steam-engine too weak for its own vapour. It is
very certain that no one could detest oppression more
truly than Landor did in all seasons and times ; and if no
one expressed that scorn, that abhorrence of tyranny and
fraud, more hastily or more intemperately, all his fire and
fury signified really little else than ill-temper too easily
provoked. Not to justify or excuse such language, but to
explain it, this consideration is urged. If not uniformly
placable, Landor was always compassionate. He was ten-
der-hearted rather than bloody-minded at all times, and upon
only the most partial acquaintance with his writings could
other opinion be formed. A completer knowledge of them
would satisfy any one that he had as little real disposition
to kill a king as to kill a mouse. In fact there is not a
more marked peculiarity in his genius than the union with
its strength of a most uncommon gentleness, and in the
personal ways of the man this was equally manifest.' —
Vol. i. p. 496.
Of his works, thus :
'Though his mind was cast in the antique mould, it had
opened itself to every kind of impression through a long and
varied life; he has written with equal excellence in both
270 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
poetry and prose, which can hardly be said of any of his
contemporaries; and perhaps the single epithet by which
his books would be best described is that reserved exclusively
for books not characterised only by genius, but also by
special individuality. They are unique. Having possessed
them, we should miss them. Their place would be supplied
by no others. They have that about them, moreover,
which renders it almost certain that they will frequently be
resorted to in future time. There are none in the language
more quotable. Even where impulsiveness and want of
patience have left them most fragmentary, this rich com-
pensation is offered to the reader. There is hardly a con-
ceivable subject, in life or literature, which they do not illus-
trate by striking aphorisms, by concise and profound obser-
vations, by wisdom ever applicable to the needs of men, and
by wit as available for their enjoyment. Nor, above all,
will there anywhere be found a more pervading passion for
liberty, a fiercer hatred of the base, a wider sympathy with
the wronged and the oppressed, or help more ready at all
times for those who fight at odds and disadvantage against
the powerful and the fortunate, than in the writings of
Walter Savage Landor.' — Last page of second volume.
The impression was strong upon the present writer's mind,
as on Mr. Forster's, during years of close friendship with
the subject of this biography, that his animosities were
chiefly referable ta the singular inability in him to dissociate
other people's ways of thinking from his own. He had, to
the last, a ludicrous grievance (both Mr. Forster and the
writer have often amused themselves with it), against a good-
natured nobleman, doubtless perfectly unconscious of having
ever given him offence. The offence was, that on the occa-
sion of some dinner party in another nobleman's house, many
years before, this innocent lord (then a commoner) had
passed in to dinner, through some door, before him, as he
himself was about to pass in through that same door with a
lady on his arm. Now, Landor was a gentleman of most
scrupulous politeness, and in his carriage of himself towards
ladies there was a certain mixture of stateliness and defer-
LANDOR'S LIFE 271
ence, belonging to quite another time, and, as Mr. Pepys
would observe, 'mighty pretty to see.' If he could by any
effort imagine himself committing such a high crime and
misdemeanour as that in question, he could only imagine
himself as doing it of a set purpose, under the sting of
some vast injury, to inflict a great affront. A deliberately
designed affront on the part of another man, it therefore
remained to the end of his days. The manner in which, as
time went on, he permeated the unfortunate lord's ancestry
with this offence, was whimsically characteristic of Landor.
The writer remembers very well, when only the individual
himself was held responsible in the story for the breach of
good breeding; but in another ten years or so, it began to
appear that his father had always been remarkable for ill
manners ; and in yet another ten years or so, his grandfather
developed into quite a prodigy of coarse behaviour.
Mr. Boythorn — if he may again be quoted — said of his
adversary, Sir Leicester Dedlock: 'That fellow is, and his
father was, and his grandfather was, the most stiff-necked,
arrogant, imbecile, pig-headed numskull, ever, by some in-
explicable mistake of Nature, born in any station of life but
a walking-stick's !'
The strength of some of Mr. Lander's most captivating
kind qualities was traceable to the same source. Knowing
how keenly he himself would feel the being at any small
social disadvantage, or the being unconsciously placed in any
ridiculous light, he was wonderfully considerate of shy peo-
ple, or of such as might be below the level of his usual
conversation, or otherwise out of their element. The writer
once observed him in the keenest distress of mind in behalf
of a modest young stranger who came into a drawing-room
with a glove on his head. An expressive commentary on this
sympathetic condition, and on the delicacy with which he ad-
vanced to the young stranger's rescue, was afterwards fur-
nished by himself at a friendly dinner at Gore House, when
it was the most delightful of houses. His dress — say, his
cravat or shirt-collar — had become slightly disarranged on a
hot evening, and Count D'Orsay laughingly called his atten-
tion to the circumstance as we rose from table. Landor be-
272 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
came flushed, and greatly agitated: 'My dear Count
D'Orsay, I thank you! My dear Count D'Orsay, I thank
you from my soul for pointing out to me the abominable
condition to which I am reduced! If I had entered the
Drawing-room, and presented myself before Lady Blessington
in so absurd a light, I would have instantly gone home, put a
pistol to my head, and blown my brains out !'
Mr. Forster tells a similar story of his keeping a com-
pany waiting dinner, through losing his way ; and of his
seeing no remedy for that breach of politeness but cutting
his throat, or drowning himself, unless a countryman whom
he met could direct him by a short road to the house where
the party were assembled. Surely these are expressive notes
on the gravity and reality of his explosive inclinations to kill
kings!
His manner towards boys was charming, and the earnest-
ness of his wish to be on equal terms with them and to win
their confidence was quite touching. Few, reading Mr.
Forster's book, can fail to see in this, his pensive remem-
brance of that 'studious wilful boy at once shy and impetu-
ous,' who had not many intimacies at Rugby, but who was
'generally popular and respected, and used his influence
often to save the younger boys from undue harshness or
violence.' The impulsive yearnings of his passionate heart
towards his own boy, on their meeting at Bath, after years
of separation, likewise burn through this phase of his
character.
But a more spiritual, softened, and unselfish aspect of it,
was to be derived from his respectful belief in happiness
which he himself had missed. His marriage had not been a
felicitous one — it may be fairly assumed for either side — but
no trace of bitterness or distrust concerning other marri-
ages was in his mind. He was never more serene than in
the midst of a domestic circle, and was invariably remarkable
for a perfectly benignant interest in young couples and
young lovers. That, in his ever-fresh fancy, he conceived
in this association innumerable histories of himself involving
far more unlikely events that never happened than Isaac
D'Israeli ever imagined, is hardly to be doubted; but as to
LANDOR'S LIFE 273
this pe.rt of his real history he was mute, or revealed his
nobleness in an impulse to be generously just. We verge
on delicate ground, but a slight remembrance rises in the
writer which can grate nowhere. Mr. Forster relates how
a certain friend, being in Florence, sent him home a leaf
from the garden of his old house at Fiesole. That friend
had first asked him what he should send him home, and he
had stipulated for this gift — found by Mr. Forster among
his papers after his death. The friend, on coming back to
England, related to Landor that he had been much embar-
rassed, on going in search of the leaf, by his driver's sud-
denly stopping his horses in a narrow lane, and presenting
him (the friend) to 'La Signora Landora.' The lady was
walking alone on a bright Italian-winter-day; and the man,
having been told to drive to the Villa Landora, inferred that
he must be conveying a guest or visitor. 'I pulled off my
hat,' said the friend, 'apologised for the coachman's mis-
take, and drove on. The lady was walking with a rapid
and firm step, had bright eyes, a fine fresh colour, and looked
animated and agreeable.' Landor checked off each clause
of the description, with a stately nod of more than ready
assent, and replied, with all his tremendous energy concen-
trated into the sentence : 'And the Lord forbid that I should
do otherwise than declare that she always WAS agreeable — to
every one but me?
Mr. Forster step by step builds up the evidence on which
he writes this life and states this character. In like man-
ner, he gives the evidence for his high estimation of Landor*s
works, and — it may be added — for their recompense against
some neglect, in finding so sympathetic, acute, and devoted a
champion. Nothing in the book is more remarkable than
his examination of each of Landor's successive pieces of
writing, his delicate discernment of their beauties, and his
strong desire to impart his own perceptions in this wise to
the great audience that is yet to come. It rarely befalls an
author to have such a commentator: to become the subject
of so much artistic skill and knowledge, combined with such
infinite and loving pains. Alike as a piece of Biography,
and as a commentary upon the beauties of a great writer,
274 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
the book is a massive book ; as the man and the writer were
massive too. Sometimes, when the balance held by Mr.
Forster has seemed for a moment to turn a little heavily
against the infirmities of temperament of a grand old friend,
we have felt something of a shock; but we have not once
been able to gainsay the justice of the scales. This feel-
ing, too, has only fluttered out of the detail, here or there,
and has vanished before the whole. We fully agree with
Mr. Forster that 'Judgment has been passed' — as it should
be — 'with an equal desire to be only just on all the qualities
of his temperament which affected necessarily not his own
life only. But, now that the story is told, no one will have
difficulty in striking the balance between its good and ill ; and
what was really imperishable in Landor's genius will not be
treasured less, or less understood, for the more perfect
knowledge of his character.'
Mr. Forster's second volume gives a facsimile of Landor's
writing at seventy-five. It may be interesting to those who
are curious in caligraphy, to know that its resemblance to
the recent handwriting of that great genius, M. Victor
Hugo, is singularly strong.
In a military burial-ground in India, the name of Walter
Landor is associated with the present writer's, over the grave
of a young officer. No name could stand there, more in-
separably associated in the writer's mind with the dignity of
generosity: with a noble scorn of all littleness, all cruelty,
oppression, fraud, and false pretence.
PLAYS
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
A COMIC BURLETTA
IN TWO ACTS
[1836]
CAST OF THE CHARACTERS
AT ST. JAMES'S THEATRE, SEPTEMBER 29, 1836.
MR. OWEN OVERTON (Mayor of a small
town on the road to Gretna, and use-
ful at the St. James's Arms)
JOHN JOHNSON (detained at the St.
James's Arms) . . . .
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN (just arrived
at the St. James's Arms) .
CHARLES TOMKINS (incognito at the St.
James's Arms) ....
TOM SPARKS (a one-eyed 'Boots' at the St.
James's Arms) ....
JOHN I Waiters at the
,TTOM St. James's Arms
WILL J
JULIA DOBBS (looking for a husband at
St. James's Arms) ....
FANNY WILSON (with an appointment at
the St. James's Arms) .
MARY WILSON (her sister, awkwardly sit-
uated at the St. James's Arms) .
MRS. NOAKES (the Landlady at the St.
James's Arms) ....
CHAMBERMAID (at the St. James's Arms)
Miss Smith and Miss Julia Smith will
'I know a Bank,' in 'The Strange
COSTUME
MR. HOLLINGSWORTH.
MR. SIDNEY.
MR. HARLEY.
MR. FORESTER.
MR. GARDNER.
MR. WILLIAMSON.
MR. MAY.
MR. COULSON.
MADAME SALA.
Miss SMITH.
Miss JULIA SMITH.
MRS. W. PENSON.
Miss STUART.
sing the duet of
Gentleman.'
MR. OWEN OVERTON. — Black smalls, and high black boots. A
blue body coat, rather long in the waist, with yellow buttons,
buttoned close up to the chin. A white stock; ditto gloves.
A broad-brimmed low-crowned white hat.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. — A light blue plaid French-cut trousers
and vest. A brown cloth frock coat, with full skirts, scarcely
covering the hips. A light blue kerchief, and eccentric low-
crowned broad-brimmed white hat. Boots.
278
CAST OF CHARACTERS 279
JOHN JOHNSON. — White fashionable trousers, boott, light vest,
frock coat, black hat, gloves, etc.
CHARLES TOMKINS. — Shepherd's plaid French-cut trousers; boots;
mohair fashionable frock coat, buttoned up; black hat,
gloves, etc.
TOM SPARKS. — Leather smalls; striped stockings, and lace-up
half boots, red vest, and a Holland stable jacket; coloured
kerchief, and red wig.
THE WAITERS. — All in black trousers, black stockingt and thoes,
white vests, striped jackets, and white kerchieft.
MARY WILSON. — Fashionable walking dress, white silk stockings;
shoes and gloves.
FANNY WILSON. — Precisely the same as Mary.
JULIA DOBBS. — A handsome wnite travelling drets, cashmere
shawl, white silk stockings; shoes and glovet. A bonnet to
correspond.
MRS. NOAKES. — A chintz gown, rather of a dark pattern, French
apron, and handsome cap.
SCENE. A SMALL TOWN, ON THE ROAD TO ORETNA.
TIME. PART OF A DAY AND NIGHT.
Time in acting. — One hour and twenty minutes.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
ACT I
SCENE I. — A Room at the St. James's Arms; Door in Centre,
with a Bolt on it. A Table with Cover, and two Chairs, R. H.
Enter MRS. NOAKES, c. DOOE.
MRS. NOAKES. Bless us, what a coachful ! Four inside —
twelve out; and the guard blowing the key-bugle in the
fore-boot, for fear the informers should see that they have
got one over the number. Post-chaise and a gig besides. —
We shall be filled to the very attics. Now, look alive,
there — bustle about.
Enter FIRST WAITEE, running, c. DOOE.
Now, John.
FIRST WAITER (coming down L. H. ). Single lady, inside the
stage, wants a private room, ma'am.
MRS. NOAKES (R. H.). Much luggage?
FIRST WAITER. Four trunks, two bonnet-boxes, six brown-
paper parcels, and a basket.
MRS. NOAKES. Give her a private room, directly. No. 1, on
the first floor.
FIRST WAITER. Yes, ma'am. [Exit FIRST WAITER, running,
C. DOOR.
Enter SECOND WAITER, running, c. DOOR.
Now, Tom.
SECOND WAITER (coming down E. H.). Two young ladies
and one gentleman, in a post-chaise, want a private sitting-
room d'rectly, ma'am.
MRS. NOAKES. Brother and sisters, Tom?
281
282 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
SECOND WAITER. Ladies are something alike, ma'am. Gen-
tleman like neither of 'em.
MRS. NOAKES. Husband and wife and wife's sister, perhaps.
Eh, Tom?
SECOND WAITER. Can't be husband and wife, ma'am, because
I saw the gentleman kiss one of the ladies.
MRS. NOAKES. Kissing one of the ladies ! Put them in the
small sitting-room behind the bar, Tom, that I may have
an eye on them through the little window, and see that
nothing improper goes forward.
SECOND WAITER. Yes, ma'am. (Going.)
MRS. NOAKES. And Tom! (Crossing to L. H.)
SECOND WAITER (coming down R. H.). Yes, ma'am.
MRS. NOAKES. Tell Cook to put together all the bones and
pieces that were left on the plates at the great dinner yes-
terday, and make some nice soup to feed the stage-coach
passengers with.
SECOND WAITER. Very well, ma'am. [Exit SECOND WAITER,
c. DOOR.
Enter THIRD WAITER, running, c. DOOR.
Now, Will.
THIRD WAITER (coming down L. H.). A strange gentleman
in a gig, ma'am, wants a private sitting-room.
MRS. NOAKES. Much luggage, Will?
THIRD WAITER. One portmanteau, and a great-coat.
MRS. NOAKES. Oh ! nonsense ! — Tell him to go into the com-
mercial room.
THIRD WAITER. I told him so, ma'am, but the Strange Gen-
tleman says he will have a private apartment, and that it 's
as much as his life is worth, to sit in a public room.
MRS. NOAKES. As much as his life is worth?
THIRD WAITER. Yes, ma'am. — Gentleman says he doesn't
care if it's a dark closet ; but a private room of some kind
he must and will have.
MRS. NOAKES. Very odd. — Did you ever see him before,
Will?
THIRD WAITER. No, ma'am; he's quite a stranger here. —
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 283
ac. i]
He's a wonderful man to talk, ma'am — keeps on like a
steam engine. Here he is, ma'am.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (without). Now don't tell me, because
that's all gammon and nonsense ; and gammoned I never was,
and never will be, by any waiter that ever drew the breath
of life, or a cork. — And just have the goodness to leave
my portmanteau alone, because I can carry it very well
myself ; and show me a private room without further delay ;
for a private room I must and will have. — Damme, do you
think I'm going to be murdered ! —
Enter the three Waiters, c. DOOB — they form down L. H., the
STRANGE GENTLEMAN following, carrying his portman-
teau and great-coat.
There — this room will do capitally well. Quite the thing,
— just the fit. — How are you, ma'am? I suppose you are
the landlady of this place? Just order those very atten-
tive young fellows out, will you, and I'll order dinner.
MRS. NOAKES (to Waiters). You may leave the room.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Hear that? — You may leave the
room. Make yourselves scarce. Evaporate— disappear —
come.
[Exeunt Waiters, c. DOOR.
That's right. And now, madam, while we're talking over
this important matter of dinner, I'll just secure us effect-
ually against further intrusion. (Bolts the door.)
MRS. NOAKES. Lor, sir! Bolting the door, and me in the
room!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Don't be afraid — I won't hurt you.
I have no designs against you, my dear ma'am : but / must
be private. (Sits on the portmanteau, R. H.)
MRS. NOAKES. Well, sir — I have no objection to break
through our rules for once; but it is not our way, when
we're full, to give private rooms to solitary gentlemen,
who come in a gig, and bring only one portmanteau.
You 're quite a stranger here, sir. If I 'm not mistaken,
it's your first appearance in this house.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You 're right, ma'am. It is my first,
my very first — but not my last, I can tell you.
284 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
MBS. NOAKES. No?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No (looking round Tww). I like the
look of this place. Snug and comfortable — -neat and lively.
You '11 very often find me at the St. James's Arms, I can
tell you, ma'am,
MRS. NOAKES (aside). A civil gentleman. Are you a stran-
ger in this town, sir?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Stranger! Bless you, no. I have
been here for many years past, in the season.
MRS. NOAKES. Indeed!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Oh, yes. Put up at the Royal Hotel
regularly f or a long time ; but I was obliged to leave it at
last.
MRS. NOAKES. I have heard a good many complaints of it.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. O ! terrible ! such a noisy house.
MRS. NOAKES. Ah!
STRANGB GENTLEMAN. Shocking! Dirt, din, din— Drum,
drum, drum, all night. Nothing but noise, glare, and non-
sense. I bore it a long time for old acquaintance sake;
but what do you think they did at last, ma'am ?
MRS. NOAKES, I can't guess.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Turned the fine Old Assembly Room
into a stable, and took to keeping horses. I tried that too,
but I found I couldn't stand it; so I came away, ma'am,
and— and— here I am. (Rises.)
MRS. NOAKES. And I '11 be bound to say, sir, that you will
have no cause to complain of the exchange.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I 'm sure not, ma'am ; I know it— I
feel it, already*
MRS. NOAKES. About dinner, sir; what would you like to
take?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Let me $ee ; will you be good enough
to suggest something, ma'am?
MRS. NOAKBS. Why, a broiled fowl and mushrooms is a very
nice dish.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You are right, ma'am ; a broiled fowl
and mushrooms form a very delightful and harmless amuse-
ment, Cither fof one or two pefsons. Broiled fowl and
mushroom* let it be, ma'am.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 285
•C. l] ,
MRS. NOAKES. In about an hour, I suppose, sir?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. For the second time, ma'am, you have
anticipated my feelings.
MRS. NOAKES. You'll want a bed to-night, I suppose, sir;
perhaps you 'd like to see it? Step this way, sir, and—
(going L. H.).
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No, no, never mind. (Aside.) This
is a plot to get me out of the room. She 's bribed by some-
body who wants to identify me. I must be careful; I am
exposed to nothing but artifice and stratagem. Never
mind, ma'am, never mind.
MRS. NOAKES. If you '11 give me your portmanteau, sir, the
Boots will carry it into the next room for you.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside.) Here's diabolical ingenuity;
she thinks it 's got the name upon it. ( To her. ) I 'm
very much obliged to the Boots for his disinterested atten-
tion, ma'am, but with your kind permission this portman-
teau will remain just exactly where it is ; consequently,
ma'am, (with great warmth,) if the aforesaid Boots wishes
to succeed in removing this portmanteau, he must pre-
viously remove me, ma'am, me; and it will take a pair of
very stout Boots to do that, ma'am, I promise you.
MRS. NOAKES. Dear me, sir, you needn't fear for your port-
manteau in this house ; I dare say nobody wants it.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I hope not, ma'am, because in that
case nobody will be disappointed. (Aside.) How she
fixes her old eyes on me !
MRS. NOAKES (aside). I never saw such an extraordinary
person in all my life. What can he be? (Looks at him,
very hard.)
[Exit MRS. NOAKES, c. DOOR.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. She 's gone at last ! Now let me com-
mune with my own dreadful thoughts, and reflect on the
best means of escaping from my horrible position.
( Takes a letter from his pocket.) Here 's an illegal death-
warrant ; a pressing invitation to be slaughtered ; a polite
request just to step out and be killed, thrust into my hand
by some disguised assassin in a dirty black calico jacket,
the very instant I got out of the gig at the door. I know
286 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
, [ACT i
the hand ; there 's a ferocious recklessness in the cross to
this 'T,' and a baleful malignity in the dot of that 'I,'
which warns me that it comes from my desperate rival.
( Opens it, and reads. ) 'Mr. Horatio Tinkles' — that 's
him — 'presents his compliments to his enemy' — that 's me
— 'and requests the pleasure of his company to-morrow
morning, under the clump of trees, on Corpse Common,'
— Corpse Common ! — 'to which any of the town's people
will direct him, and where he hopes to have the satisfac-
tion of giving him his gruel.' — Giving him his gruel!
Ironical cut-throat ! — 'His punctuality will be esteemed a
personal favour, as it will save Mr. Tinkles the trouble and
inconvenience of calling with a horsewhip in his pocket.
Mr. Tinkles has ordered breakfast at the Royal for one.
It is paid for. The individual who returns alive can eat
it. Pistols — half-past five — precisely.' — Bloodthirsty mis-
creant \ The individual who returns alive ! I have seen
him hit the painted man at the shooting-gallery regularly
every time in his centre shirt plait, except when he varied
the entertainments, by lodging the ball playfully in his
left eye. Breakfast ! I shall want nothing beyond the
gruel. What 's to be done ? Escape ! I can't escape ;
concealment 's of no use, he knows I am here. He has
dodged me all the way from London, and will dodge me
all the way to the residence of Miss Emily Brown, whom
my respected, but swine-headed parents have picked out
for my future wife. A pretty figure I should cut before
the old people, whom I have never beheld more than once
in my life, and Miss Emily Brown, whom I have never
seen at all, if I went down there, pursued by this Sala-
mander, who, I suppose, is her accepted lover! What is
to be done? I can't go back again ; father would be furious.
What can be done? nothing! (Sinks into a chair.) I
must undergo this fiery ordeal, and submit to be packed
up, and carried back to my weeping parents, like an un-
fortunate buck, with a flat piece of lead in my head, and
a brief epitaph on my breast, 'Killed on Wednesday morn-
ing.' No, I won't (starting up, and walking about). I
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 287
SC. l]
won't submit to it ; I '11 accept the challenge, but first I '11
write an anonymous letter to the local authorities, giving
them information of this intended duel, and desiring* them
to place me under immediate restraint. That 's feasible ;
on further consideration, it 's capital. My character will
be saved — I shall be bound over — he '11 be bound over — I
shall resume my journey — reach the house — marry the girl
— pocket the fortune, and laugh at him. No time to be
lost ; it shall be done forthwith. ( Goes to table and writes. )
There ; the challenge accepted, with a bold defiance, that '11
look very brave when it comes to be printed. Now for the
other. (Writes.) 'To the Mayor — Sir — A strange Gen-
tleman at the St. James's Arms, whose name is unknown
to the writer of this communication, is bent upon com-
mitting a rash and sanguinary act, at an early hour to-
morrow morning. As you value human life, secure the
amiable youth, without delay. Think, I implore you, sir,
think what would be the feelings of those to whom he is
nearest and dearest, if any mischance befall the interesting
young man. Do not neglect this solemn warning; the
number of his room is seventeen.' There — (folding it
up). Now if I can find any one who will deliver it se-
cretly.—
TOM SPARKS, with a pair of boots in hit hand, peep* in
at the c. D.
TOM. Are these here your'n?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No.
TOM. Oh! (going back).
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Hallo ! stop, are you the Boots?
TOM (still at the door). I'm the head o' that branch o' the
establishment. There 's another man under me, as brushes
the dirt off, and puts the blacking on. The fancy work '•
my department ; I do the polishing, nothing else.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You are the upper Boots, then?
TOM. Yes, I'm the reg'lar; t'other one's only the deputy;
top boots and half boots, I calls us.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You 're a sharp fellow.
288 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
TOM. Ah! I 'd better cut then (going).
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Don't hurry, Boots — don't hurry ; I
want you. (Rises, and comes forward, a. H.)
TOM (coming forward, L. H.). Well!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Can — can — you be secret, Boots?
TOM. That depends entirely on accompanying circumstances ;
—see the point?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I think I comprehend your meaning,
Boots. You insinuate that you could be secret (putting
hig hand in his pocket) if you had— five shillings for in-
stance—isn't that it, Boots?
TOM. That 's the line o' argument I should take up ; but that
an't exactly my meaning.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No !
TOM. No. A secret 's a thing as is always a rising to One's
lips. It requires an astonishing weight to keep one on
'cm down.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Ah!
TOM. Yes ; I don't think I could keep one snug — reg'lar
snug, you know — -
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Yes, regularly snug, of course.
TOM. — If it had a less weight a-top on it, than ten shillins.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You don't think three half-crowns
would do it?
TOM. It might, I won't say it wouldn't, but I couldn't war-
rant it.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You could the other!
TOM. Yes.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Then there it is. (Gives him four
half-crowns.) You see these letters?
TOM. Yes, I can manage that without my spectacles.
STEANGE GENTLEMAN. Well ; that 's to be left at the Royal
Hotel. This, this, is an anonymous one ; and I want it to
be delivered at the Mayor's house, without his knowing
from whom it came, or seeing who delivered it.
TOM (taking the letters). I say — you 're a rum 'un, you are.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Think so ! Ha, ha ! so are you.
TOM. Ay, but you 're a rummer one than me.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No, no, that 's your modesty.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 289
sc. rj
TOM. No it an't. I say, how veil you did them last hay-
stacks. How do you contrive that ere now, if it's a fair
question. Is it done with a pipe, or do you use them Lu-
cifer boxes?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Pipe-— Lucifer boxes — hay-stacks!
Why, what do you mean?
TOM (looking cautiously round"). I know your name, old 'un.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You know my name! (Aside.)
Now how the devil has he got hold of that, I wonder !
TOM. Yes, I know itk It begins with a 'S.'
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Begins with an S !
TOM. And ends with a <G,' (winking). We 've all heard talk
of Swing down here.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Heard talk of Swing ! Here 's a situa-
tion ! Damme, d 'ye think I 'm a walking carbois of vit-
riol, and burn everything I touch? — Will you go upon the
errand you 're paid for?
TOM. Oh, I 'm going — I 'm going. It 's nothing to me, you
know; I don't care. I '11 only just give these boots to the
deputy, to take them to whoever they belong to, and then
I '11 pitch this here letter in at the Mayor's office-window,
in no time.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Will you be off?
TOM, Oh, I 'm going, I 'm going. Close, you knows, close !
[Exit TOM, c. DOOR.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. In five minutes more the letter will be
delivered ; in another half hour, if the Mayor does his duty,
I shall be in Custody, and secure from the vengeance of
this infuriated monster. I wonder whether they 'll take
me away ? Egad ! I may as well be provided with a clean
shirt and a nightcap in case. Let 's see, she said the next
room was my bedroom, and as I have accepted the chal-
lenge, I may venture so far now. (Shouldering the port-
manteau.) What a capital notion it is; there '11 be all the
correspondence in large letters, in the county paper, and
my name figuring away in roman capitals, with a long
story, how I was such a desperate dragon, and so bent
upon fighting, that it took four constables to carry me to
the Mayor, and one boy to carry my hat. It 's a capital
290 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
plan — must be done — the only way I have of escaping un-
pursued from this place, unless I could put myself in the
General Post, and direct myself to a friend in town. And
then it 's a chance whether they 'd take me in, being so
much over weight. [Exit STEANGE GENTLEMAN, with
portmanteau^ L. H.
MRS. NOAKES, peeping m c. DOOE, then entering.
Mas. NOAKES. This is the room, ladies, but the gentleman has
stepped out somewhere, he won't be long, I dare say.
Pray come in, Miss.
Enter MARY and FANNY WILSON, c. DOOR.
MARY (c.). This is the Strange Gentleman's apartment, is it?
MRS. NOAKES (R.). Yes, Miss; shall I see if I can find him,
ladies, and tell him you are here?
MARY. No; we should prefer waiting till he returns, if you
please.
MRS. NOAKES. Very well, ma'am. He '11 be back directly, I
dare say ; for it 's very near his dinner time.
[Exit MRS. NOAKES, c. DOOR.
MARY. Come, Fanny, dear; don't give way to these feelings
of depression. Take pattern by me — I feel the absurdity
of our situation acutely ; but you see that I keep up, never-
theless.
FANNY. It is easy for you to do so. Your situation is neither
so embarrassing, nor so painful a one as mine.
MARY. Well, my dear, it may not be, certainly; but the cir-
cumstances which render it less so are, I own, somewhat in-
comprehensible to me. My harebrained, mad-cap swain,
John Johnson, implores me to leave my guardian's house,
and accompany him on an expedition to Gretna Green. I
with immense reluctance, and after considerable pressing —
FANNY. Yield a very willing consent.
MARY. Well, we won't quarrel about terms ; at all events I do
consent. He bears me off, and when we get exactly half-
way, discovers that his money is all gone, and that we must
stop at this Inn, until he can procure a remittance from
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 291
sc. ij
London, by post. I think, my dear, you '11 own that thit
is rather an embarrassing position.
FANNY. Compare it with mine. Taking advantage of your
flight, I send express to my admirer, Charles Tomkins, to
say that I have accompanied you; first, because I should
have been miserable if left behind with a peevish old man
alone ; secondly, because I thought it proper that your sis-
ter should accompany you —
MARY. And, thirdly, because you knew that he would im-
mediately comply with this indirect assent to his entreaties
of three months' duration, and follow you without delay,
on the same errand. Eh, my dear?
FANNY. It by no means follows that such was my intention,
or that I knew he would pursue such a course, but sup-
posing he has done so; supposing this Strange Gentleman
should be himself —
MARY. Supposing! — Why, you know it is. You told him
not to disclose his name, on any account ; and the Strange
Gentleman is not a very common travelling name, I should
imagine ; besides the hasty note, in which he said he should
join you here.
FANNY. Well, granted that it is he. In what a situation am
I placed. You tell me, for the first time, that my violent
intended must on no account be beheld by your violent in-
tended, just now, because of some old quarrel between them,
of long standing, which has never been adjusted to this
day. What an appearance this will have ! How am I to ex-
plain it, or relate your present situation? I should sink
into the earth with shame and confusion.
MARY. Leave it to me. It arises from my heedlessness. I
will take it all upon myself and see him alone. But tell
me, my dear — as you got up this love affair with so much
secrecy and expedition during the four months you spent
at Aunt Martha's, I have never yet seen Mr. Tompkins,
you know. Is he so very handsome?
FANNY. See him, and judge for yourself.
MARY. Well, I will ; and you may retire, till I have paved the
way for your appearance. But just assist me first, dear, in
292 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
making a little noise to attract his attention, if he really be
in the next room, or I may wait here all day.
DUET-— -^f end of which exit FANNY, c. DOOR, MARY
retires up R, H,
Enter STRANGE GENTLEMAN, L. H.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. There ; now with a clean shirt in one
pocket and a night-cap in the other, J 'm ready to be car'
ried magnanimously to my dungeon in the cause of love.
MARY {aside). He says, he 's ready to be carried magnani-
mously to a dungeon in the cause of love, I thought it
was Mr. Tomkins! Hem! (Coming down, L, n.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (seeing her). Hallo! Who's this!
Not a disguised peace officer in petticoats. Beg your par-
don, ma'am. (Advancing towards her.) What-"— did- —
you—
MARY. Oh, Sir ; I feel the delicacy of my situation.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). Feels the delicacy of her sit-
uation ; Lord bless us, what 's the matter ! Permit me to
offer you a seat, ma'am, if you 're in a delicate situation.
(He places chairs; they sit.)
MARY. You are very good, Sir. You are surprised to see me
here, Sir?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No, no, at least not very ; rather, per-
haps— rather. (Aside. ) Never was more astonished in
all my life !
MARY (aside). His politeness, and the extraordinary tale I
have to tell him, overpower me. I must summon up courage.
Hem!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Hem!
MARY. Sir!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Ma'am !
MARY. You have arrived at this house in pursuit of a young
lady, if I mistake not?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You are quite right, ma'am.
(Aside,) Mysterious female !
MARY. If you are the gentleman I ?m in search of, you wrote
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 293
SC. l]
a hasty note a short time since, stating that you would be
found here this afternoon.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (drawing back his chair). I— L wrote
a note, ma'am !
MARY. You need keep nothing secret from me, Sir. I know
all.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). That villain, Boots, hag be-
trayed me! Know all, ma'am?
MARY. Everything.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). It must be so. She's A con-
stable's wife.
MARY. You are the writer of that letter, Sir? I think I am
not mistaken,
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You are not, ma'am; I Confess I did
write it. What was I to do, ma'am? Consider the situa-
tion in which I was placed*
MARY. In your situation, you had, as it appears to me, only
one course to pursue,
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You mean the course I adopted?
MARY. Undoubtedly.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I am very happy to hear you say so,
though of course I should like it to be kept a secret.
MARY. Oh, of course.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (drawing his cJiair close to her, and
speaking very softly). Will you allow me to ask you,
whether the constables are downstairs?
MARY (surprised). The constables!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN* Because if I am to be apprehended, I
should like to have it over. I am quite ready, if it must
be done.
MARY. No legal interference has been attempted. There is
nothing to prevent your continuing your journey to-night*
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. But will not the other party follow?
MARY (looking down). The other party, I am compelled to
inform you, is detained here by — 'by want of funds.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (starting up). Detained here by want
of funds ! Hurrah ! Hurrah ! I have caged him at last.
I 'm revenged for all his blustering and bullying. This is
294 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
a glorious triumph, ha, ha, ha ! I have nailed him — nailed
him to the spot !
MARY (rising indignantly). This exulting over a fallen foe,
Sir, is mean and pitiful. In my presence, too, it is an
additional insult.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Insult ! I wouldn't insult you for the
world, after the joyful intelligence you have brought me
— I could hug you in my arms ! — One kiss, my little con-
stable's deputy. (Seizing her.)
MARY (struggling with him). Help! help!
Enter JOHN JOHNSON, c. DOOR.
JOHN. What the devil do I see ! (Seizes STRANGE GENTLE-
MAN by the collar.)
MARY (L. H.). John, and Mr. Tomkins, met together!
They '11 kill each other. — Here, help ! help !
[Exit MARY, running, c. DOOR.
JOHN (shaking him). What do you mean by that, scoundrel?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Come, none of your nonsense —
there 's no harm done.
JOHN. No harm done. — How dare you offer to salute that
lady?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN,. What did you send her here for?
JOHN. / send her here!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Yes, you; you gave her instructions,
I suppose. (Aside.) Her husband, the constable, evi-
dently.
JOHN. That lady, Sir, is attached to me.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Well, I know she is ; and a very use-
ful little person she must be, to be attached to anybody, —
it 's a pity she can't be legally sworn in.
JOHN. Legally sworn in! Sir, that is an insolent reflection
upon the temporary embarrassment which prevents our
taking the marriage vows. How dare you to insinuate —
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Pooh ! pooh ! — don't talk about daring
to insinuate; it doesn't become a man in your station of
life—
JOHN. My station of life!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. But as you have managed this matter
^ THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 295
very quietly, and say you 're in temporary embarrasment—
here — here 's five shillings for you. (Offers it.)
JOHN. Five shillings ! (Raises his cane.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (flourishing a chair). Keep off, sir!
Enter MARY, TOM SPARKS, and two Waiters.
MARY. Separate them, or there '11 be murder! (TOM clasps
STRANGE GENTLEMAN round the waist — the Waiters seize
JOHN JOHNSON).
TOM. Come, none o» that 'ere, Mr. S. We don't let private
rooms for such games as these. — If you want to try it on
wery partickler, we don't mind making a ring for you in
the yard, but you mustn't do it here.
JOHN. Let me get at him. Let me go ; waiters — Mary, don't
hold me. I insist on your letting me go.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Hold him fast. — Call yourself a peace
officer, you prize-fighter!
JOHN (struggling). Let me go, I say!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Hold him fast ! Hold him fast !
[ToM takes STRANGE GENTLEMAN off, R. H. Waiters
take JOHN off, L. H., MARY following.
SCENE II. — Another Room m the Inn.
Enter JULIA DOBBS and OVERTON, L. H.
JULIA. You seem surprised, Overton.
OVERTON. Surprised, Miss Dobbs! Well I may be, when,
after seeing nothing of you for three years and more, you
come down here without any previous notice, for the ex-
press purpose of running away — positively running away,
with a young man. I am astonished, Miss Dobbs !
JULIA. You would have had better reason to be astonished if
I had come down here with any notion of positively running
away with an old one, Overton.
OVERTON. Old or young, it would matter little to me, if you
had not conceived the preposterous idea of entangling me —
me, an attorney, and mayor of the town, in so ridiculous a
scheme. — Miss Dobbs, I can't do it. — I really cannot con-
sent to mix myself up with such an affair.
296 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
, [ACT i
JULIA. Very well, Overtoil, very well. You recollect that in
the lifetime of that poor old dear, Mr. Woolley, who —
OVEETON. — Who would have married you, if he hadn't died ;
and who, as it was, left you his property, free from all in-
cumbrances, the incumbrance of himself, as a husband, not
being among the least.
JULIA. Well, you may recollect, that in the poor old dear's
lifetime, sundry advances of money were made to you, at
my persuasion, which still remain unpaid. Oblige me by
forwarding them to my agent in the course of the week,
and I free you from any interference in this little matter.
(Crosses to L. H. and is going.)
OVERTON. Stay, Miss Dobbs, stay. As you say, we are old
acquaintances, and there certainly were some small sums of
money, which — which —
JULIA. Which certainly are still outstanding.
OVERTON. Just so, just so; and which, perhaps, you would
be likely to forget, if vou had a husband — eh, Miss Dobbs,
eh?
JULIA. I have little doubt that I should. If I gained one
through your assistance, indeed — I can safely say I should
forget all about them.
OVEIITON. My dear Miss Dobbs, we perfectly understand each
other. — Pray proceed.
JULIA. Well — dear Lord Peter —
OVERTON. That 's the young man you 're going to run away
with, I presume?
JULIA. That 's the young nobleman who 's going to run away
with me, Mr. Overton.
OVERTON. Yes, just so. — I beg your pardon — pray go on.
JULIA. Dear Lord Peter is young and wild, and the fact is, his
friends do not consider him very sagacious or strong-
minded. To prevent their interference, our marriage is to
be a secret one. In fact, he is stopping now at a friend's
hunting seat in the neighbourhood ; he is to join me here;
and we are to be married at Gretna.
OVERTON. Just so. — A matter, as it seems to me, which you
can conclude without my interference.
JULIA. Wait an instant. To avoid suspicion, and prevent our
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 297
SC. II ]
being recognised and followed, I settled with him that you
should give out in this house that he was a lunatic, and that
I — his aunt — was going to convey him in a chaise, to-night,
to a private asylum at Berwick. I have ordered the chaise
at half-past one in the morning. You can see him, and
make our final arrangements. It will avert all suspicion,
if I have no communication with him, till we start. You
can say to the people of the house that the sight of me
makes him furious.
OVERTOX. Where shall I find him? — Is he here?
JULIA. You know best.
OVERTOX. I!
JULIA. I desired him, immediately on his arrival, to write you
some mysterious nonsense, acquainting you with the num-
ber of his room.
OVERTOX (producing a letter). Dear me, he has arrived, Miss
Dobbs.
JULIA. No !
OVERTOX. Yes — see here — a most mysterious and extraor-
dinary composition, which was thrown in at my office win-
dow this morning, and which I could make neither head nor
tail of . Is that his handwriting? (Giving her the letter.)
JULIA (taking letter). I never saw it more than once, but I
know he writes very large and straggling. — (Looks at let-
ter.) Ha, ha, ha! This is capital, isn't it?
OVERTOX. Excellent ! — Ha, ha, ha ! — So mysterious !
JULIA. Ha, ha, ha ! — So very good — 'Rash act.'
OVERTOX. Yes. Ha, ha !
JULL\. 'Interesting young man.'
OVERTOX. Yes. — Very good.
JULIA. 'Amiable youth !'
OVERTOX. Capital!
JULIA. 'Solemn warning!'
OVERTOX. Yes. — That 's best of all. (They both laugh.)
JULIA. Number seventeen, he says. See him at once, that 's
a good creature. (Returning the letter.)
OVERTOX (taking letter). I will. (He crosses to L. H. and
rings a bell.)
298 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT I
Enter WAITER, L. H.
Who is there in number seventeen, waiter?
WAITER.. Number seventeen, sir? — Oh! — the strange gentle-
man, sir.
OVERTON. Show me the room. [Exit WAITER, L. H.
(Looking at JULIA, and pointing to the letter.) 'The
Strange Gentleman.' — Ha, ha, ha ! Very good — very good
indeed. — Excellent notion! (They both laugh.)
[Exeunt severally.
SCENE III. — Same as the first. — A small table, with wine,
dessert, and lights on it, R. H. of c. DOOR ; two chairs.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN discovered seated at table.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. 'The other party is detained here, by
want of funds.' Ha, ha, ha ! I can finish my wine at my
leisure, order my gig when I please, and drive on to
Brown's in perfect security. I '11 drink the other party's
good health, and long may Le be detained here. (Fills a
glass.) Ha, ha, ha! The other party; and long may he
— (A knock at c. DOOR.) Hallo ! I hope this isn't the other
party. Talk of the — (A knock at c. DOOR.) Well —
(setting down his glass) — this is the most extraordinary
private room that was ever invented. I am continually
disturbed by unaccountable knockings. (A gentle tap at
c. DOOR. ) There 's another ; that was a gentle rap — a per-
suasive tap — like a friend's fore-finger on one's coat-
sleeve. It can't be Tinkles with the gruel. — Come in.
OVERTON peeping in at c. DOOR.
OVERTON. Are you alone, my Lord?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (amazed). Eh!
OVERTON. Are you alone, my Lord?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. My Lord !
OVERTON (stepping in, and closing the door). You are right,
sir, we cannot be too cautious, for we do not know who
may be within hearing. You are very right, sir.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 299
BC. II I J
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (rising from table, and coming for-
ward, R. H.). It strikes me, sir, that you are very wrong.
OVERTON. Very good, very good ; I like this caution ; it shows
me you are wide awake.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Wide awake! — danime, I begin to
think I am fast asleep, and have been for the last two
hours.
OVERTON (whispering). I — am — the mayor.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (m the same tone). Oh!
OVERTON. This is your letter? (Shows it; STRANGE GEN-
TLEMAN nods assent solemnly.) It will be necessary for
you to leave here to-night, at half-past one o'clock, in a
postchaise and four ; and the higher you bribe the postboys
to drive at their utmost speed, the better.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You don't say so?
OVERTON. I do indeed. You are not safe from pursuit here.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Bless my soul, can such dreadful
things happen in a civilised community, Mr. Mayor?
OVERTON. It certainly does at first sight appear rather a
hard case that people cannot marry whom they please, with-
out being hunted down in this way.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. To be sure. To be hunted down, and
killed, as if one was game, you know.
OVERTON. Certainly ; and you an't game, you know.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Of course not. But can't you pre-
vent it? can't you save me by the interposition of your
power?
OVERTON. My power can do nothing in such a case.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Can't it, though?
OVERTON. Nothing whatever.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I never heard of such dreadful re-
venge, never! Mr. Mayor, I am a victim, I am the un-
happy victim of parental obstinacy.
OVERTON. Oh, no ; don't say that. You may escape yet
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (grasping his hand). Do you think I
may? Do you think I may, Mr. Mayor?
OVERTON. Certainly ! certainly ! I have little doubt of it, if
you manage properly.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I thought I teat managing properly.
300 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
I understood the other party was detained here, by want
of funds.
OVERTON. Want of funds ! — There 's no want of funds in
that quarter, I can tell you.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. An't there, though?
OVERTON. Bless you, no. Three thousand a year ! — But who
told you there was a want of funds?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Why, she did.
OVERTON. She! you have seen her then? She told me you
had not.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Nonsense ; don't believe her. She was
in this very room half an hour ago.
OVERTON. Then I must have misunderstood her, and you must
have misunderstood her too. — But to return to business.
Don't you think it would keep up appearances if I had you
put under some restraint.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I think it would. I am very much
obliged to you. (Aside.) This regard for my character
in an utter stranger, and in a Mayor too, is quite affecting.
OVERTON. I '11 send somebody up, to mount guard over you.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Thank 'ee, my dear friend, thank 'ee.
OVERTON. And if you make a little resistance, when we take
you upstairs to your bedroom, or away in the chaise, it will
be keeping up the character, you know.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. To be sure. — So it will. — I '11 do it.
OVERTON. Very well, then. I shall see your Lordship again
by and by. — For the present, my Lord, good evening.
(Going.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Lord ! — Lordship ! — Mr. Mayor !
OVERTON. Eh? — Oh! — I see. (Comes forward.) Practising
the lunatic, my Lord. Ah, very good — very vacant look
indeed. — Admirable, my Lord, admirable ! — I say, my Lord
— (pointing to letter) — 'Amiable youth!' — 'Interesting
young man." — 'Strange Gentleman.' — Eh? Ha, ha, ha!
Knowing trick indeed, my Lord, very !'
[Exit OVERTON, c. D.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. That mayor is either in the very last
stage of mystified intoxication, or in the most hopeless state
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 301
*C. IIlJ
of incurable insanity. — I have no doubt of it. A little
touched here (tapping his forehead). Never mind, he is
sufficiently sane to understand my business at all events.
(Goes to table and takes a glass.) Poor fellow! — I'll
drink his health, and speedy recovery. (A knock at c.
DOOE.) It is a most extraordinary thing, now, that every
time I propose a toast to myself, some confounded fellow
raps at that door, as if he were receiving it with the utmost
enthusiasm. Private room ! — I might as well be sitting
behind the little shutter of a Two-penny Post Office, where
all the letters put in were to be post-paid. (A knock at
c. DOOR.) Perhaps it's the guard! I shall feel a great
deal safer if it is. Come in. (He has brought a chair
forward, and sits L. H.)
Enter TOM SPARKS, c. DOOR, very slowly, with an enormous
stick. He closes the door, and, after looking at the
STRANGE GENTLEMAN very steadily, brings a chair down L.
H., and sits opposite him.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Are you sent by the mayor of this
place, to mount guard over me?
TOM. Yes, yes. — It 's all right.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). It's all right — I'm safe.
(To TOM, with affected indignation.) Now mind, I have
been insulted by receiving this challenge, and I want to
fight the man who gave it me. I protest against being
kept here. I denounce this treatment as an outrage.
TOM. Ay, ay. Anything you please — poor creature; don't
put yourself in a passion. It'll only make you worse.
(Whistles.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. This is most extraordinary behaviour.
I don't understand it.— What d' ye mean by behaving in
this manner? (Rising.)
TOM (aside). He's getting wiolent. I must frighten him
with a steady look. — I say, young fellow, do you see this
here eye? (Staring at him, and pointing at his own eye.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). Do I see his eye!— What can
he mean by glaring upon me, with that large round optic J
302 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT i
— Ha! a terrible light flashes upon me. — He thought I
was 'Swing' this morning. It was an insane delusion. —
That eye is an insane eye. — He 's a madman !
TOM. Madman ! Damme, I think he is a madman with a ven-
geance.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. He acknowledges it. He is sensible
of his misfortune! — Go away — leave the room instantly,
and tell them to send somebody else. — Go away!
TOM. Oh, you unhappy lunatic !
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. What a dreadful situation! — I shall
be attacked, strangled, smothered, and mangled, by a mad-
man ! Where 's the bell ?
TOM (advancing and brandishing his stick). Leave that 'ere
bell alone — leave that 'ere bell alone — and come here !
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Certainly, Mr. Boots, certainly. —
He's going to strangle me. (Going towards table.) Let
me pour you out a glass of wine, Mr. Boots — pray do!
(Aside.) If he said 'Yes,' I'd throw the decanter at his
temple.
TOM. None o' your nonsense. — Sit down there. (Forces hvm
into a chair, L. H.) I'll sit here. (Opposite him, R. H.)
Look me full in the face, and I won't hurt you. Move
hand, foot, or eye, and you '11 never want to move either
of 'em again.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I 'm paralysed with terror.
TOM. Ha! (raising his stick in a threatening attitude.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. I 'm dumb, Mr. Boots — dumb, sir.
They sit gazing intently on each other; TOM with the
stick raised, as the Act Drop sloidy descends.
END OF ACT FIRST
roan ACT rirnr MINUTES.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 303
tc. i]
ACT II
SCENE I. — The same as SCENE III, ACT I.
TOM SPARKS discovered in the same attitude watching the
STRANGE GENTLEMAN, who has fallen asleep with his
head over the back of his Chair.
TOM. He 's asleep ; poor unhappy wretch ! How very mad
he looks with his mouth wide open and his eyes shut!
(STRANGE GENTLEMAN snores.) Ah! there's a wacant
snore ; no meaning in it at all. I cou'd ha' told he was out
of his senses from the very tone of it. (He snores again.) .
That 's a wery insane snore. I should say he was melan-
choly mad from the sound of it.
Enter, through c. DOOR, OVERTON, MRS. NOAKES, a Chamber-
maid, and two Waiters; MRS. NOAKES with a warming-
pan, the Maid with a light. STRANGE GENTLEMAN
starts up, greatly exhausted.
TOM (starting up in c.). Hallo! — Hallo! keep quiet, young
fellow. Keep quiet !
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (L. H.). Out of the way, you savage
maniac. Mr. Mayor (crossing to him, R. H.), the person
you sent to keep guard over me is a madman, sir. What
do you mean by shutting me up with a madman? — what do
you mean, sir, I ask?
OVERTON, R. H. c. {aside to STRANGE GENTLEMAN). Bravo!
bravo ! very good indeed — excellent !
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Excellent, sir ! — It 's ho.rrible ! — The
bare recollection of what I have endured, makes me shud-
der, down to my very toe-nails.
MRS. NOAKES (R. H.). Poor dear! — Mad people always think
other people mad.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Poor dear ! Ma'am ! What the devil
do you mean by 'Poor dear?' How dare you have a mad-
man here, ma'am, to assault and terrify the visitors to your
establishment ?
MRS. NOAKES. Ah ! terrify indeed ! I '11 never have another,
304, THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT n
to please anybody, you may depend upon that, Mr. Over-
ton. (To STRANGE GENTLEMAN.) There, there. — Don't
exert yourself, there 's a dear.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (c.). Exert myself! — Damme! it's a
mercy I have any life left to exert myself with. It 's a spe-
cial miracle, ma'am, that my existence has not long ago
fallen a sacrifice to that sanguinary monster in the leather
smalls.
OVERTON, R. c. (aside to STRANGE GENTLEMAN). I never saw
any passion more real in my life. Keep it up, it 's an ad-
mirable joke.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Joke! — joke! — Peril a precious life,
and call it a joke, — you, a man with a sleek head and a
broad-brimmed hat, who ought to know better, calling it a
joke. — Are you mad too, sir, — are you mad? (Confront-
ing OVERTON.)
TOM, L. H. (very loud). Keep your hands off. Would you
murder the wery mayor, himself, you mis-rable being?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Mr. Mayor, I call upon you to issue
your warrant for the irstant confinement of that one-eyed
Orson in some place of security.
OVERTON (aside, advancing a little). He reminds me that he
had better be removed to his bedroom. He is right. —
Waiters, carry the gentleman upstairs. — Boots, you will
continue to watch him in his bedroom.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. He continue! — What, am I to be
boxed up again with this infuriated animal, and killed off,
when he has done playing with me? — I won't go — I won't
go — help there, help! (The Waiters cross from R. H. to
behind him.)
Enter JOHN JOHNSON hastily, c. DOOR.
JOHN (coming forward L. H.). What on earth is the meaning
of this dreadful outcry, which disturbs the whole house?
MRS. NOAKES. Don't be alarmed, sir, I beg. — They 're only
going to carry an unfortunate gentleman, as is out of his
senses, to his bedroom.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN, c. (to JOHN). Constable — constable
— do your duty — apprehend these persons — every one of
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 305
BC. l]
them. Do you hear, officer, do you hear? — (The Waiters
seize him by the arms.) — Here — here — you see this.
You 've seen the assault committed. Take them into cus-
tody— off with them.
MRS. NOAKES. Poor creature ! — He thinks you are a consta-
ble, sir.
JOHN. Unfortunate man ! It is the second time to-day that
he has been the victim of this strange delusion.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (breaking from Waiters and going to
JOHN. L. H. Unfortunate man ! — What, do you think I
am mad?
JOHN. Poor fellow! His hopeless condition is pitiable in-
deed. (Goes up.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (returning to c.). They 're all mad I—-
Every one of 'em !
MRS. NOAKES. Come now, come to bed — there 's a dear young
man, do.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Who are you, you shameless old ghost,
standing there before company, with a large warming-pan,
and asking me to come to bed? — Are you mad?
MRS. NOAKES. Oh ! he 's getting shocking now. Take him
away. — Take him away.
OVERTON. Ah, you had better remove him to his bedroom at
once. (The Waiters take him up by the feet and shoul-
ders. )
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Mind, if I survive this, I '11 bring an
action of false imprisonment against every one of you.
Mark my words — especially against that villainous old
mayor. — Mind, I '11 do it ! (They bear Urn off, struggling
and talking — the others crowding round, and assisting.)
OVERTON (following). How well he does it!
[Exeunt L. H. 1st E.
Enter a Waiter, showing m CHARLES TOMKINS in a
travelling coat, c. DOOR.
WAITER (L. H.). This room is disengaged now, sir. There
was a gentleman in it, but he has just left it.
CHARLES. Very well, this will do. I may want a bed here
to-night, perhaps, waiter.
306 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT n
WAITER. Yes, sir. — Shall I take your card to the bar, sir?
CHARLES. My card ! — No, never mind.
WAITER. No name, sir?
CHARLES. No — it doesn't matter.
WAITER (aside, as going out). Another Strange Gentleman!
[Exit Waiter, c. DOOR.
CHARLES. Ah! — (Takes off coat.) — The sun and dust on this
long ride have been almost suffocating. I wonder whether
Fanny has arrived? If she has — the sooner we start for-
ward on our journey further North the better. Let me
see ; she would be accompanied by her sister, she said in her
note — and they would both be on the look-out for me.
Then the best thing I can do is to ask no questions, for the
present at all events, and to be on the look-out for them.
(Looking towards c. DOOR.) Why here she comes, walk-
ing slowly down the long passage, straight towards this
room — she can't have seen me yet. — Poor girl, how melan-
choly she looks ! I '11 keep in the background for an in-
stant, and give her a joyful surprise. (He goes up R. H.)
Enter FANNY, c. DOOE.
FANNY (L. H.). Was ever unhappy girl placed in so dreadful
a situation ! — Friendless, and almost alone, in a strange
place — my dear, dear Charles a victim to an attack of
mental derangement, and I unable to avow my interest in
him, or express my anxious sympathy and solicitude for his
sufferings ! I cannot bear this dreadful torture of agonis-
ing suspense. I must and will see him, let the cost be what
it may. (She is going L. H.)
CHARLES (coming forward R. H.). Hist! Fanny!
FANNY (starting and repressing a scream). Ch — Charles —
here in this room t
CHARLES. Bodily present, my dear, in this very room. My
darling Fanny, let me strain you to my bosom. (Advanc-
ing.)
FANNY (shrinking back). N — n — no, dearest Charles, no, not
now. — (Aside.) — How flushed he is!
CHARLES. No ! — Fanny, this cold reception is a very different
one to what I looked forward to meeting with, from you.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 307
1C. l]
FANNY (advancing, and offering the tip of her finger).
N— n — no — not cold, Charles ; not cold. I do not mean it
to be so, indeed. — How is your head, now, dear?
CHARLES. How is my head! After days and weeks of sus-
pense and anxiety, when half our dangerous journey is
gained, and I meet you here, to bear you whither you can be
made mine for life, you greet me with the tip of your
longest finger, and inquire after my head, — Fanny, what can
you mean?
FANNY. You — you have startled me rather, Charles. — I
thought you had gone to bed.
CHARLES. Gone to bed! — Why I have but this moment ar-
rived.
FANNY (aside). Poor, poor Charles!
CHARLES. Miss Wilson, what am I to —
FANNY. No, no ; pray, pray, do not suffer yourself to be ex-
cited—
CHARLES. Suffer myself to be excited . — Can I possibly avoid
it? can I do aught but wonder at this extraordinary and
sudden change in your whole demeanour? — Excited! But
five minutes since, I arrived here, brimful of the hope and
expectation which had buoyed up my spirits during my
long journey. I find you cold, reserved, and embarrassed
— everything but what I expected to find you — and then
you tell me not to be excited.
FANNY (aside). He is wandering again. The fever is evi-
dently upon him.
CHARLES. This altered manner and ill-disguised confusion all
convince me of what you would fain conceal. Miss Wil-
son, you repent of your former determination, and lova
another !
FANNY. Poor fellow!
CHARLES. Poor fellow! — What, am I pitied?
FANNY. Oh, Charles, do not give way to this. Consider how
much depends upon your being composed.
CHARLES. I see how much depends upon my being composed,
ma'am — well, very well. — A husband depends upon it,
ma'am. Your new lover is in this house, and if he over-
hears my reproaches he will become suspicious of the woman
308 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT ii
who has jilted another, and may jilt him. That 's it,
madam — a great deal depends, as you say, upon my being
composed. — A great deal, ma'am.
FANNY. Alas ! these are indeed the ravings of frenzy.
CHARLES. Upon my word, ma'am, you must form a very
modest estimate of your own power, if you imagine that
disappointment has impaired my senses. Ha, ha, ha! — I
am delighted. I am delighted to have escaped you, ma'am.
I am glad, ma'am — damn'd glad! (Kicks a chair over.)
FANNY (aside). I must call for assistance. He grows more
incoherent and furious every instant.
CHARLES. I leave you, ma'am. — I am unwilling to interrupt
the tender tete-a-tete with the other gentleman, to which
you are, no doubt, anxiously looking forward. — To you
I have no more to say. To him I must beg to offer a few
rather unexpected congratulations on his approaching mar-
riage. [Exit CHARLES hastily, c. DOOR.
FANNY. Alas ! it is but too true. His senses have entirely left
him. [Exit L. H.
SCENE SECOND AND LAST. — A Gallery in the Inn, leading to
the Bedrooms. Four Doors in the Flat, and one at each
of the upper Entrances, numbered from 20 to 25, begin^-
ning at the R. H. A pair of boots at the door of 23.
Enter Chambermaid with two lights; and CHARLES TOMKINS,
R. H. \st E.
MAID. This is your room, sir, No. 21. (Opening the door.)
CHARLES. Very well. Call me at seven in the morning.
MAID. Yes, sir. (Gives him a light, and
[Exit Chambermaid, R. H. 1st E.
CHARLES. And at nine, if I can previously obtain a few
words of explanation with this unknown rival, I will just
return to the place from whence I came, in the same coach
that brought me down here. I wonder who he is and where
he sleeps. (Looking round.) I have a lurking suspicion
of those boots. (Pointing to No. 23.) They are an ill-
looking, underhanded sort of pair, and an undefinable
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 309
8C. II ]
instinct tells rue that they have clothed the feet of the rascal
I am in search of. Besides myself, the owner of those
ugly articles is the only person who has yet come up to
bed. I will keep my eyes open for half an hour or so ; and
my ears too.
[Exit CHARLES into No. 21.
Enter R. H. 1st E. MRS. NOAKES with two lights,
followed by MARY and FANNY.
MRS. NOAKES. Take care of the last step, ladies. This way,
ma'am, if you please. No. 20 is your room, ladies: nice
large double-bedded room, with coals and a rushlight.
FANNY, R. H. (aside to MARY). I must ask which is his
room. I cannot rest unless I know he has at length sunk
into the slumber he so much needs. (Crosses to MRS.
NOAKES, who is L. H.) Which is the room in which the
Strange Gentleman sleeps?
MRS. NOAKES. No. 23, ma'am. There 's his boots outside
the door. Don't be frightened of him, ladies. He 's very
quiet now, and our Boots is a watching him.
FANNY. Oh, no — we are not afraid of him. (Aside.)
Poor Charles !
MRS. NOAKES (going to door No. 20, which is 3rd E. R. H.).
This way, if you please ; you '11 find everything very com-
fortable, and there 's a bell-rope at the head of the bed, if
you want anything in the morning. Good night, ladies.
As MARY and FANNY pass MRS. NOAKES, FANNY
takes a light.
[Exeunt FANNY and MARY into No. 20.
MRS. NOAKES (tapping at No. 23). Tom — Tom—
Enter Tom from No. 23.
TOM (coming forward, ~L. H.). Is that you, missis?
MRS. NOAKES (R. H.). Yes.— How 's the Strange Gentleman,
Tom?
TOM. He was very boisterous half an hour ago, but
punched his head a little, and now he 's uncommon com-
fortable. He 's fallen asleep, but his snores is still wery
incoherent.
310 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT n
MRS. NOAKES. Mind you take care of him, Tom. They '11
take him away in half an hour's time. It 's very nearly
one o'clock now.
TOM. I '11 pay ev'ry possible attention to him. If he offers
to call out, I shall whop him again. [Exit TOM mto No. 23.
MRS. NOAKES (looking off R. H.). This way, ma'am, if you
please. Up these stairs.
Enter JULIA DOBBS with a light, R. H. 1st E.
JULIA. Which did you say was the room in which I could
arrange my dress for travelling?
MRS. NOAKES. No. 22, ma'am; the next room to your
nephew's. Poor dear — he 's fallen asleep, ma'am, and I
dare say you '11 be able to take him away very quietly by
and by.
JULIA (aside). Not so quietly as you imagine, if he plays
his part half as well as Overton reports he does. (To
MRS. NOAKES.) Thank you. — For the present, good
night. [Exit JULIA into No. 22.
MRS. NOAKES. Wish you good night, ma'am. There. — Now
I think I may go downstairs again, and see if Mr. Overton
wants any more negus. Why who 's this? (Looking off
B. H.) Oh, I forgot — No. 24« an't a-bed yet. — It's him.
Enter JOHN JOHNSON with a light, R. H. 1st E.
MRS. NOAKES. No. 24, sir, if you please.
JOHN. Yes, yes, I know. The same room I slept in last night.
(Crossing L. H.)
MRS. NOAKES. Yes, sir. — Wish you good night, sir.
[Exit MRS. NOAKES, R. H. 1st E.
JOHN. Good night, ma'am. The same room I slept in last
night, indeed, and the same room I may sleep in to-morrow
night, and the next night, and the night after that, and
just as many more nights as I can get credit here, unless
this remittance arrives. I could raise the money to prose-
cute my journey without difficulty were I on the spot; but
my confounded thoughtless liberality to the post-boys has
left me absolutely penniless. Well, we shall see what to-
morrow brings forth. (He goes into No. 24, but im-
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 311
BC. II ]
mediately returns and places Us boots outside his room
door, leaving it ajar.) [Exit JOHN into No. 24.
CHARLES peeping from No. 81, and putting out his boots.
CHARLES. There 's another pair of boots. Now I wonder
which of these two fellows is the man. I can't help think-
ing it's No. 23. — Hallo! (He goes in and closes his
door.)
The door of No. 20 opens; FANNY comes out with a light m
a night shade. No. 23 opens. She retires into No. 20.
Enter TOM SPARKS, with a stable lantern from No. 23.
TOM (closing the door gently). Fast asleep still. I may as
veil go my rounds, and glean for the deputy. (Pulls out
a piece of chalk from his pocket, and takes up boots from
No. 23.) Twenty-three. It's difficult to tell what a fel-
low is ven he han't got his senses, but I think this here
twenty-three 's a timorous faintr hearted genus. (Ex-
amines the boots.) You want new soleing, No. 23. (Goes
to No. 24, takes up boots and looks at them.) Hallo!
here 's a bust : and there 's been a piece put on in the corner.
— I must let my missis know. The bill 's always doubtful
ven there 's any mending. (Goes to No. 81, takes up
boots.) French calf Vellingtons. — All's right here.
These here French calves always comes it strong — light
vines, and all that 'ere. (Looking round.) Werry
happy to see there an't no high-lows — they never drinks
nothing but gin-and-vater. Them and the cloth boots
is the vurst customers an inn has. — The cloth boots is
always obstemious, only drinks sherry vine and vater, and
never eats no suppers. (He chalks the No. of the room
on each pair of boots as he takes them up.) Lucky for
you, my French calves, that you an't done with the patent
polish, or you 'd ha' been witrioled in no time. I don't
like to put oil o' witriol on a well-made pair of boots;
ben ven they 're rubbed vith that 'ere polish, it must be
done, or the profession 's ruined.
[Exit TOM with boots, R. H. 1st E.
812 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT ii
Enter FANNY from No. 20, with light as before.
FANNY. I tremble at the idea of going into his room, but
surely at a moment like this, when he is left to be attended
by rude and uninterested strangers, the strict rules of
propriety which regulate our ordinary proceedings may
be dispensed with. I will but satisfy myself that he sleeps,
and has those comforts which his melancholy situation de-
mands, and return immediately. (Goes to No. 23, and
knocks. )
CHARLES TOMKINS peeping from No. 21.
CHARLES. I '11 swear I heard a knock. — A woman ! Fanny
Wilson — and at that door at this hour of the night !
FANNY comes forward.
Why what an ass I must have been ever to have loved that
girl. — It is No. 23, though. — I '11 throttle him presently.
The next room-door open — I 'II watch there. (He crosses
to No. 24, and goes in.)
[FANNY returns to No. 23, and knocks-r-the door opens and
the STRANGE GENTLEMAN appears, night-cap on his head
and a light in his hand. — FANNY screams and runs back
into No. 20.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (coming forward). Well, of all the
wonderful and extraordinary houses that ever did exist, this
particular tenement is the most extraordinary. I 've got
rid of the madman at last — and it 's almost time for that
vile old mayor to remove me. But where? — I 'm lost, be-
wildered, confused, and actually begin to think I am mad.
Half these things I 've seen to-day must be visions of fancy
— they never could have really happened. No, no, I 'm
clearly .mad ! — I 've not the least doubt of it now. I 've
caught it from that horrid Boots. He has inoculated the
whole establishment. We 're all mad together. — (Looking
off a. H.) Lights coming upstairs! — Some more lunatics.
[Exit STRANGE GENTLEMAN in No. 23.
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 313
»C. II J
Enter R. H. 1st E. OVERTON with a cloak, MRS. NOAKES, TOM
SPARKS with lantern, and three Waiters with lights.
The Waiters range up R. H. side. TOM is in K. u.
corner and MRS. NOAKES next to him.
OVERTON. Remain there till I call for your assistance. (Goes
up to No. 23 and knocks.)
Enter STRANGE GENTLEMAN from No. 22.
Now, the chaise is ready. — Muffle yourself up in this cloak.
(Puts it on the STRANGE GENTLEMAN. — They come for-
ward. )
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (L. H.). Yes.
OVERTON (c.). Make a little noise when we take you away,
you know.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Yes — yes. — I say, what a queer room
this is of mine. Somebody has been tapping at the wall
for the last half hour, like a whole forest of woodpeckers.
OVERTON. Don't you know who that was?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No.
OVERTON. The other party.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (alarmed). The other party!
OVERTON. To be sure. — The other party is going with you.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Going with me! — In the same chaise!
OVERTON. Of course. — Hush! (Goes to No. 22. Knocks.)
Enter JULIA DOBBS from No. 22, wrapped up ma large cloak.
Look here! (Bringing her forward. JULIA is next to
MRS. NOAKES.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (starting into L. H. CORNER). I won't
go — I Won't go. This is a plot — a conspiracy. I won't
go, I tell you. I shall be assassinated. — I shall be mur-
dered !
FANNY and MART appear at No. 20, JOHNSON and TOMKINS
at 24.
JOHN (at the door). I told you he was mad.
CHARLES (at the door). I see— I see— poor fellow!
314 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT ii
JULIA (crossing to STRANGE GENTLEMAN and taking hit
arm). Come, dear, come.
Mas. NOAKES. Yes, do go, there 's a good soul. Go with
your affectionate aunt.
STEANGE GENTLEMAN (breaking from her}. My affectionate
aunt!
JULIA returns to her former position.
TOM. He don't deserve no affection. I niver see such an un-
fectionate fellow to his relations.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (L. H.). Take that wretch away, and
smother him between two feather beds. Take him away,
and make a sandwich of him directly.
JULIA (to OVERTON, "who is in c.). What voice was that? —
It was not Lord Peter's. (Throwing off her cloak.)
OVERTON. Nonsense — nonsense. — Look at him. (Pulls cloak
off STRANGE GENTLEMAN.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (turning round). A woman!
JULIA. A stranger!
OVERTON. A stranger! What, an't he your husband that is
to — your mad nephew, I mean?
JULIA. No !
ALL. No!
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. No ! — no, I '11 be damned if I am. I
an't anybody's nephew. — My aunt 's dead, and I never had
an uncle.
MRS. NOAKES. And an't he mad, ma'am?
JULIA. No.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Oh, I 'm not mad. — I was mistaken
just now.
OVERTON. And isn't he going away with you?
JULIA. No.
MARY (coming forward R. H., next to MRS. NOAKES). And
isn't his name Tomkins?
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (very loud.) No.
(All these questions and answers should be very rapid.
JOHNSON and TOMKINS advance to the ladies, and they
all retire up.)
THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN 315
8C. II ]
MRS. NOAKES. What is his name? (Producing a letter.) It
an't Mr. Walker Trott, is it? (She advances a little to-
wards him.)
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Something so remarkably like it,
ma'am, that, with your permission, I '11 open that epistle.
(Taking letter.)
All go up, but JULIA and STRANGE GENTLEMAN.
(Opening letter.) Tinkle's hand. (Reads.) 'The chal-
lenge was a ruse. By this time I shall have been united at
Gretna Green to the charming Emily Brown.' — Then,
through a horror of duels, I have lost a wife !
JULIA (R. H. with her handkerchief to her eyes). And
through Lord Peter's negligence, I have lost a husband !
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Eh! (Regards her a moment, then
beckons OVERTON, who comes forward, L. H.) I say, didn't
you say something about three thousand a year this morn-
ing
OVERTON. I did.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You alluded to that party? (Nod-
ding towards JULIA.)
OVERTON. I did.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Hem! (Puts OVERTON back.) Per-
mit me, ma'am (going to her), to sympathise most respect-
fully with your deep distress.
JULIA. Oh, sir! your kindness penetrates to my very heart.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). Penetrates to her heart! —
It 's taking the right direction. — If I understand your sor-
rowing murmur, ma'am, you contemplated taking a destined
husband away with you, in the chaise at the door?
JULIA. Oh ! sir, — spare my feelings — I did. — The horses were
ordered and paid for; and everything was ready.
( Weeps. )
STRANGE GENTLEMAN (aside). She weeps. Expensive
thing, posting, ma'am.
JULIA. Very, sir.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Eighteen-pence a mile, ma'am, no*
including the boys.
JULIA. Yes, sir.
316 THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN
[ACT n
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. You 've lost a husband, ma'am — /
have lost a wife. — Marriages are made above — I 'm quite
certain ours is booked. — Pity to have all this expense for
nothing — let 's go together.
JULIA (drying her eyes). The suddenness of this proposal,
sir —
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Requires a sudden answer, ma'am. —
You don't say no — you mean yes. Permit me to — (kisses
her). — All right! Old one (to OVERTON, who comes down
L. H.), I 've done it. — Mrs. Noakes (she comes down R. H.),
don't countermand the chaise. — We 're off directly.
CHARLES (who with FANNY comes down L. H. c.). So are we.
JOHN (wJio with MARY comes down R. H. c.). So are we,
thanks to a negotiated loan, and an explanation as hasty as
the quarrel that gave rise to it.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. Three post-chaises and four, on to
Gretna, directly. \JZxewnk Waiters, R. H. \st E.
I say — we '11 stop here as we come back?
JOHN and CHARLES. Certainly.
STRANGE GENTLEMAN. But before I go, as I fear I have
given a great deal of trouble here to-night — permit me to
inquire whether you will view my mistakes and perils with
an indulgent eye, and consent to receive 'The Strange Gen-
tleman* again to-morrow.
JOHN. JULIA. STRANGE GENTLEMAN.
MARY. FANNY.
MRS. NOAKES. CHARLES.
TOM. OVERTON.
R. H. L. H.
CURTAIN.
THE END
SECOND ACT THIRTY MIXCTEi.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
A COMIC OPERA
IN TWO ACTS
(Music by John Hullah)
[1836]
DEDICATION
To J. P. HARLEY, ESQ.
MY DEAR SIR,
My dramatic bantlings are no sooner born, than you
father them. You have made my 'Strange Gentleman' ex-
clusively your own ; you have adopted Martin Stokes with
equal readiness ; and you still profess your willingness to do
the same kind office for all future scions of the same stock.
I dedicate to you the first play I ever published; and you
made for me the first play I ever produced : — the balance is in
your favour, and I am afraid it will remain so.
That you may long contribute to the amusement of the
public, and long be spared to shed a lustre, by the honour and
integrity of your private life, on the profession which for
many years you have done so much to uphold, is the sincere
and earnest wish of, my dear Sir,
Yours most faithfully,
CHARLES DICKENS.
December 15th, 1836.
PREFACE
'EITHER the Honourable Gentleman is in the right, or he ii
not,' is a phrase in very common use within the walls of Parlia-
ment. This drama may have a plot, or it may not ; and the
songs may be poetry, or they may not ; and the whole affair,
from beginning to end, may be great nonsense, or it may
not, just as the honourable gentleman or lady who reads it
may happen to think. So, retaining his own private and par-
ticular opinion upon the subject (an opinion which he formed
upwards of a year ago, when he wrote the piece), the Author
leaves every such gentleman or lady, to form his or hers,
as he or she may think proper, without saying one word to
influence or conciliate them.
All he wishes to say is this ; — That he hopes Ma. BEAHAM,
and all the performers who assisted in the representation of
this opera, will accept his warmest thanks for the interest
they evinced in it, from its very first rehearsal, and for their
zealous efforts in his behalf — efforts which have crowned it
with a degree of success far exceeding his most sanguine an-
ticipations ; and of which no form of words could speak his
acknowledgment.
It is needless to add that the libretto of an opera must
be, to a certain extent, a mere vehicle for the music ; and that
it is scarcely fair or reasonable to judge it by those strict
rules of criticism which would be justly applicable to a five-
act tragedy, or a finished comedy.
DRAMATIS PERSONS
AT ST. JAMES'S THEATRE., DECEMBER 6, 1836
SQUIRE NORTON 'ln- • 'in' /!;I(J .-J<i* ' . MR. BRAHAM.
THE HON. SPARKINS FLAM (his friend) . MR. FORESTER.
OLD BENSON (a small farmer') . .. MR. STRICKLAND.
MR. MARTIN STOKES (a very small farmer
with a very large circle of particular
friends) . * ,,jo . ,ti,f ,', , MR. HARLEY.
GEORGE EDMUNDS (betrothed to Lucy) . MR. BENNETT.
YOUNG BENSON • ..,.' |,',Oi • * * ^Rl ^' PARRY«
JOHN MADDOX (attached to Rose) '. - . MR. GARDNER.
LUCY BENSON . . . .*i^J . Miss RAINFORTH.
ROSE (her cousin) v? * '"•', • Miss J. SMITH.
Time occupied in Representation. — Trvo hours and a half,
PERIOD. THE AUTUMN OF 1 72Q.
SCENE. — AN ENGLISH VILLAGE.
The Passages marked with inverted commas were omitted
in the representation.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
ACT I
SCENE I. — A Rick-yard, with a cart laden tenth corn-sheaves.
JOHN MADDOX, and labourers, unloading it. Implements
of husbandry, etc., lie scattered about. A gate on on*
side. JOHN MADDOX is in the cart, and dismounts at
the conclusion of the Chorus.
Round.
Hail to the merry Autumn days, when yellow cornfields shine,
Far brighter than the costly cup that holds the monarch's
wine!
Hail to the merry harvest time, the gayest of the year,
The time of rich and bounteous crops, rejoicing, and good
cheer !
'Tis pleasant on a fine Spring morn to see the buds expand,
'Tis pleasant in the Summer time to view the teeming land ;
'Tis pleasant on a Winter's night to crouch around the
blaze, —
But what are joys like these, my boys, to Autumn's merry
days !
Then hail to merry Autumn days, when yellow corn-fields
shine,
Far brighter than the costly cup that holds the monarch's
wine !
And hail to merry harvest time, the gayest of the year,
The time of rich and bounteous crops, rejoicing, and good
cheer !
JOHN. Well done, my lads ; a good day's work, and a warm
one. Here, Tom (to Villager}, run into the house, and
323
324 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
ask Miss Rose to send out some beer for the men, and a
jug for Master Maddox; and d'ye hear, Tom, tell Miss
Rose it 's a fine evening, and that if she '11 step out herself,
it '11 do her good, and do me good into the bargain.
(Exit Villager.") That 's right, my lads, stow these sheaves
away, before the sun goes down. Let 's begin fresh in the
morning, without any leavings of to-day. By this time
to-morrow the last load will have been carried, and then
for our Harvest-Home!
VILLAGERS. Hurrah ! Hurrah !
(First four lines of Round repeated.)
Enter MARTIN STOKES.
MARTIN. Very good ! very good, indeed ! — always sing while
you work — capital custom ! I always do when I work, and
I never work at all when I can help it ; — another capital
custom. John, old fellow, how are you? — give us your
hand, — hearty squeeze, — good shake, — capital custom num-
ber three. Fine dry weather for the harvest, John. Talk-
ing of that, I 'm dry too : you always give away plenty of
beer, here ; — capital custom number four. Trouble you
for the loan of that can, John.
JOHN (takmg it from the cart). Here's the can, but as
to there being anything good in it it 's as dry as the
weather, and as empty as you. Hoo ! hoo ! (laughing bois-
terously, is suddenly checked by a look from MARTIN).
MARTIN. Hallo, John, hallo ! I have often told you before,
Mr. Maddox, that I don't consider you in a situation of
life which entitles you to make jokes, far less to laugh at
'em. If you must make a joke, do it solemnly, and re-
spectfully. If / laugh, that 's quite enough, and it must
be far more gratifying to your feelings than any contor-
tions of that enormous mouth of yours.
JOHN. Well, perhaps, as you say, I ought n't to make jokes
till I arrive, like you, at the dignity of a small piece of
ground and a cottage; but I must laugh at a joke, some-
times.
MARTIN. Must, must you! — Rather presuming fellow, this
Maddox. (Aside.)
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 325
BC. l]
JOHN. Why, when you make one of them rum jokes of
yours, — 'cod, I must laugh then !
MARTIN. Oh ! ah ! you may laugh then, John ; always laugh
. at my jokes, — capital custom number five ; no harm in that,
because you can't help it, you know. — Knowing fellow,
though. (Aside).
JOHN. Remember that joke about the old cow, as you made
five years ago ? — 'cod, that was a joke ! Hoo ! hoo ! hoo . —
I never shall forget that joke. I never see a cow, to this
day, without laughing.
MAETIN. Ha ! ha ! ha ! very good, very good ! — Devilish clever
fellow this! (Aside.) Well, Jack, you behave yourself
well, all the evening, and perhaps I may make that joke
again before the day 's out.
JOHN. Thank 'ee, that 's very kind.
MARTIN. Don't mention it, don't mention it ; but I say, John,
I called to speak to you about more important matters. —
Something wrong here, an't there? (Mysteriously.)
JOHN. Wrong ! you 're always fancying something wrong.
MARTIN. Fancying, — come, I like that. I say, why don't
you keep your harvest-home at home, to-morrow night?
Why are we all to go up to the Squire's, as if we couldn't
be merry in Benson's barn? And why is the Squire always
coming down here, looking after some people, and cutting
out other people? — an't that wrong? Where's George
Edmunds — old Benson 's so fond of, and that Lucy was
fond of too, once upon a time, — eh? An't that wrong?
Where 's your sweetheart, Rose ? — An't her walkings, and
gigglings, and whisperings, and simperings, with the
Squire's friend, Mr. Sparkins Flam, the talk of the whole
place? Nothing wrong there, — eh? (MADDOX goes up.)
Had him there ; I knew there was something wrong. I '11
keep a sharp eye upon these doings, for I don't like these
new-fangled customs. It was all very well in the old time,
to see the Squire's father come riding among the people
on his bay cob, nodding to the common folks, shaking hands
with me, and all that sort of thing ; but when you change
the old country-gentleman into a dashing fop from Lon-
don, and the steady old steward into Mr. Sparkins Flam,
326 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
the case is very different. We shall see, — but if I might
tell Miss Lucy Benson a bit of my mind, I should say,
'Stick to an independent young fellow, like George Ed-
munds, and depend upon it you will be happier than you
would with all the show and glitter of a squire's lady.'
And I should say to Rose, very solemn, 'Rose — '
ROSE enters unpercevued, with beer.
'Rose—*
ROSE (starting). Lord bless us! What a hollow voice! —
Why, it *s Mr. Stokes ! — What on earth is the matter with
him?
MAETIN (not seeing her). Rose, — if you would be happy
and contented, if you would escape destruction, shield your-
self from dangerous peril, and save yourself from horrid
ruin! —
ROSE. What dreadful words! —
MARTIN. You will at once, and without delay, bestow your
hand on John Maddox ; or if you would aspire to a higher
rank in life, and a loftier station in society, you will culti-
vate the affections of Mr. Stokes, — Mr. Martin Stokes, —
a young gentleman of great mental attractions, and very
considerable personal charms; leaving the false and fatal
Flam to the ignominious fate which —
ROSE. Why, Mr. Stokes. —
MARTIN. Ignominious fate which —
ROSE. Dear, he must be in a fit ! Mr. Stokes !
MARTIN. Eh? — Ah! Miss Rose, — It's you, is it?
ROSE. Me ! Yes, and here have I been waiting all this
time, while you were talking nonsense to yourself. Here, I
have brought you some beer.
MARTIN. Oh ! Miss Rose, if you go on in this way, you '11
bring us to our bier, instead of bringing our beer to us.
(Looking round.) You may laugh, if you want to, very
much, John.
JOHN. Hoo ! hoo ! hoo !
ROSE. Be quiet, oaf! And pray, sir (to MARTIN), to what
may your most humorous observation refer?
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 327
30. I J
MARTIN. Why, my dear Miss Rose, you know my way,—
always friendly,— always thinking of the welfare of those
I like best, and very seldom receiving any gratitude in
return.
ROSE. I know you very seldom deserve any.
MARTIN. Ah ! that 's exactly my meaning ; that 's the way,
you see. The moment I begin to throw out a hint to one
of my dear friends, out comes some unkind and rude re-
mark. But I bear it all for their sakes. I won't allow you
to raise my ill nature, — you shan't stop me. I was going
to say, don't you think — now don't you think — that you
—don't be angry — make rather — don't colour up, — rather
too free with Mr. Sparkins Flam?
ROSE. / make free with Mr. Sparkins Flam! Why you
odious, insolent creature !
MARTIN. Ah, of course — always the way — I told you so —
I knew you 'd say that.
ROSE. And you, John, you mean-spirited scarecrow ; will you
stand there, and see me insulted by an officious, imper-
tinent—
MARTIN. Go on, go on! (A gun fired.) Hallo! (Look-
ing off.) Here they are, the Squire and Mr. Sparkins
Flam.
ROSE (hastily adjusting her dress). My goodness! Mr.
Spar — run, John, run, there 's a dear !
JOHN (not moving). Very dear, I dare say.
ROSE. Run, and tell my uncle and Lucy, that Mr. Spar — •
I mean that the Squire 's coming.
JOHN. I wouldn't ha' gone anyhow; but nobody need go
now, for here they are. Now, I 'm extinguished for the
rest of the day.
Enter through the gate SQUIRE NORTON and MR. SPARKINS
FLAM, dressed for sporting, with guns, etc., and two
Gamekeepers. On the other side, Old BENSON and LUCY.
MARTIN, during the whole scene, thrusts himself in the
SQUIRE'S way, to be taken notice of.
SQUIRE (to Gamekeeper, and putting down his gun). Take
328 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT I
the birds into the house. Benson, we have had a good day's
sport, but a tiring one ; and as the load is heavy for my
fellows, you '11 let our game remain where it is. I could
not offer it to a better friend.
BENSON. Your honour 's very good, but —
SQUIRE. Nay, you make a merit of receiving the smallest
favour.
BENSON. Not a merit of receiving, nor a boast of refusing
it ; but a man in humble station should be cautious how he
receives favours from those above him, which he never
asks, and can never return. I have had too many such
favours forced upon me by your honour, lately, and would
rather not increase the number.
SQUIRE. But such a trifle —
BENSON. A trifle from an equal, but a condescension from
a superior. Let your men carry your birds up to the Hall,
sir, or, if they are tired, mine shall do it for them, and wel-
come. (Retires up.)
FLAM (aside). Swine and independence! Leather breeches
and liberty !
SQUIRE. At least I may be permitted to leave a few brace, as
a present to the ladies. Lucy, I hope, will not object.
(Crosses to her.)
Lucy. I feel much flattered by your honour's politeness —
and — and — and —
ROSE. My cousin means to say, sir, that we 're very much
obliged to your honour and Mr. Flam for your politeness,
and that we are very willing to accept of anything, your
honour.
FLAM (aside). Condescending little savage!
SQUIRE. You have spoken very well, both for yourself and
your cousin. Flam, this is Rose — the pretty little Rose,
you know.
FLAM. Know! can I ever forget the charming Rose — the
beautiful — the — the — (aside) the Cabbage Rose!
SQUIRE (aside). Keep that girl engaged, while I talk to the
other one.
ROSE. Oh, Mr. Flam !
FLAM. Oh, Miss Rose! (He salutes her.)
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 329
•0. l]
BENSON. Your honour will not object to taste our ale, after
jour day's sport. The afternoon is fresh and cool, and
'twill be pleasant here in the air. Here, Ben, Thomas,
bring mugs here — quick — quick — and a seat for his hon-
our. [Exeunt BENSON, MADDOX, etc.
SQUIRE. It will be delightful — won't it, Flam ?
FLAM. Inexpressibly charming ! (Aside.) An amateur tea-
garden. (He retires a little up with ROSE — she coquet-
ting.)
SQUIRE (to LUCY). And in such society, how much the pleas-
ure will be enhanced!
LUCY, Your honour knows I ought not to listen to you —
George Edmunds would —
SQUIRE. Edmunds! a rustic! — you cannot love that Ed-
munds, Lucy. Forget him — remember your own worth.
LUCY. I wish I could, sir. My heart will tell me though,
weak and silly as I am, that I cannot better show the con-
sciousness of my own worth, than by remaining true to
my first and early love. Your honour rouses my foolish
pride ; but real true love is not to be forgotten easily.
Song. — LUCY.
Love is not a feeling to pass away,
Like the balmy breath of a summer day ;
It is not — it cannot be — laid aside;
It is not a thing to forget or hide.
It clings to the heart, ah, woe is me!
As the ivy clings to the old oak tree.
Love is not a passion of earthly mould,
As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold :
For when all these wishes have died away,
The deep strong love of a brighter day,
Though nourish'd in secret, consumes the more,
As the slow rust eats to the iron's core.
Re-enter OLD BENSON, JOHN MADDOX, and Villagers, with
jugs, seats, etc.; SQUIRE NORTON seats himself next
LUCY, and ROSE contrives to sit next MR. SPARKINS
330 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
FLAM, which MARTIN and MADDOX in vain endeavour
to prevent.
SQUIRE. Flam, you know these honest people? all tenants
of my own.
FLAM. Oh, yes, I know *em — pleasant fellows ! — This — this
is — what 's his name ?
BENSON. Martin, sir, — Martin Stokes.
MARTIN (starting forward). A — a — Mr. Stokes, at your
service, sir, — how do you do, sir? (shaking FLAM by the
hand, while speaking). I hope you are quite well, sir; I
am delighted to see you looking so well, sir. I hope your
majestic father, and your fashionable mother, are in the
enjoyment of good health, sir. I should have spoken to
you before, sir, only you have been so very much engaged,
that I couldn't succeed in catching your honourable eye;
— very happy to see you, sir.
FLAM. Ah. Pleasant fellow, this Martin! — agreeable man-
ners,— no reserve about him.
MARTIN. Sir, you do me a great deal of honour. Mr. Nor-
ton, sir, I have the honour of drinking your remarkably
good health, — I admire you, sir.
SQUIRE (laughing). Sir, I feel highly gratified, I 'm sure.
MARTIN (aside). He's gratified! — I flatter myself I have
produced a slight impression here. (Drinks.)
FLAM (turns round, sees MADDOX). Ah, Ox!
JOHN. Ox! Who do you call Ox? Maddox is my name.
FLAM. Oh, mad Ox! true; I forget the lunacy: — your
health, mad Ox.
SQUIRE (rising and coming forward). Come, Flam, another
glass. Here, friends, is success to our Harvest-Home !
MARTIN. Hear, hear! a most appropriate toast, most elo-
quently given, — a charming sentiment, delightfully ex-
pressed. Gentlemen (to Villagers), allow me to have the
pleasure of proposing Mr. Norton, if you please. Take
your time from me. (He gives the time, and they all
cheer.) Mr. Norton, sir, I beg to call upon you for a
song.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 331
SC. II]
Song. — SQUIRE; NORTON.
That very wise old head, old JSsop, said,
The bow should be sometimes loose ;
Keep it tight for ever, the string you sever: —
Let 's turn his old moral to use.
The world forget, and let us yet,
The glass our spirits buoying,
Revel to-night in those moments bright
Which make life worth enjoying.
The cares of the day, old moralists say,
Are quite enough to perplex one ;
Then drive to-day's sorrow away till to-morrow,
And then put it off till the next one.
Chorus. — The cares of the day, etc.
Some plodding old crones, the heartless drones !
Appeal to my cool reflection,
And ask me whether such nights can ever
Charm sober recollection.
Yes, yes ! I cry, I '11 grieve and die,
When those I love forsake me ;
But while friends so dear surround me here,
Let Care, if he can, o'ertake me.
Chorus. — -The cares of the day, etc.
(During the Chorus, SQUIRE NORTON and FLAM resume their
guns, and go up the stage, followed by the -carious char-
acters. The Chorus concludes as the Scene closes.)
SCENE II. — An open spot near the village, with stile and
pathway leading to the church, which is seen in the
distance.
GEORGE EDMUNDS enters, with a stick in his hand.
EDMUNDS. How thickly the fallen leaves lie scattered at the
feet of that old row of elm-trees ! When I first met Lucy
on this spot, it was a fine spring day, and those same leaves
were trembling in the sunshine, as green and bright as if
332 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
their beauty would last for ever. What a contrast they
present now, and how true an emblem of my own lost hap-
piness !
Song. — GEORGE EDMUNDS.
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here ;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
How like the hopes of childhood's day,
Thick clustering on the bough!
How like those hopes is their decay, —
How faded are they now !
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here ;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
Wither'd leaves, wither'd leaves, that fly before the gale ;
Withered leaves, wither'd leaves, ye tell a mournful tale,
Of love once true, and friends once kind,
And happy moments fled:
Dispersed by every breath of wind,
Forgotten, changed, or dead!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here ;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
An hour past the old time, and still no Lucy ! 'Tis useless
lingering here : I '11 wait no longer. A female crossing the
meadow! — 'Tis Rose, the bearer of a letter or a message
perhaps.
Enter ROSE. (She avoids him.)
No ! Then I will see Lucy at once, without a moment's de-
lay. (Going.)
ROSE. No, no, you can't. (Aside.) There'll certainly be
bloodshed ! I am quite certain Mr. Flam will kill him. He
offered me, with the most insinuating speeches, to cut John's
throat at a moment's notice: and when the Squire compli-
mented him on being a good shot, he said he should like to
'bag' the whole male population of the village. (To him,.)
You can't see her.
gc ^^ THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 333
EDMUNDS. Not see her, and she at home! Were you in-
structed to say this, Rose?
ROSE. I say it, because I know you can't see her. She is not
well ; and — and —
EDMUNDS. And Mr. Norton is there, you would say.
ROSE. Mr. Norton !
EDMUNDS. Yes, Mr. Norton. Was he not there last evening?
Was he not there the evening before? Is he not there at
this moment?
Enter JOHN MADDOX.
JOHN. There at this moment ? — of course he is.
ROSE, (aside). John here!
JOHN. Of course he is ; of course he was there last night ; and
of course he was there the evening before. He 's always
there, and so is his bosom friend and confidential demon,
Mr. Sparkins Flam. Oh ! George, we 're injured men, both
of us.
EDMUNDS. Heartless girl ! (Retires up.)
JOHN (to ROSE). Faithless person.
ROSE. Don't call me a person.
JOHN. You are a person, perjured, treacherous, and deceiv-
ing ! Oh ! George, if you had scon what I have seen to-day.
Soft whisperings and loving smiles, gentle looks and encour-
aging sighs, — such looks and cighs as used once upon a time
to be bestowed on us, George ! If you had seen the Squire
making up to Lucy, and Rosa making up to Flam: — but
I am very glad ycu did not see it, George, very. It would
have broken your heart, as it has broken mine ! Oh, Rose !
could you break my heart?
ROSE. I could break your head with the greatest pleasure, you
mischief-making booby; and if you don't make haste to
wherever you 're going, somebody that I know of will cer-
tainly do so, very quickly.
JOHN. Will he, will he? — your friend, Mr. Flam, I suppose!
Let him — that 's all ; let him ! (Retires up.)
ROSE. Oh !,I '11 let him: you needn't be afraid of my interfer-
ing. Dear, dear, I wish Mr. Flam would come, for I will
834 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
own, notwithstanding what graver people may say, that I
enjoy a little flirtation as much as any one.
Song. — ROSE.
Some folks who have grown old and sour,
Say love does nothing but annoy.
The fact is, they have had their hour,
So envy what they can't enjoy.
I like the glance — I like the sigh —
That does of ardent passion tell !
If some folks were as young as I,
I 'm sure they 'd like it quite as well.
Old maiden aunts so hate the men,
So well know how wives are harried,
It makes them sad — not jealous — when
They see their poor dear nieces married.
All men are fair and false, they know,
And with deep sighs they assail 'em,
It 's so long since they tried men, though,
I rather think their memories fail 'em.
— Here comes Mr. Flam. You 'd better go, John. I know
you '11 be murdered.
JOHN. Here I shall stop; let him touch me, and he shall feel
the weight of my indignation.
Enter FLAM.
FLAM. Ah, my charmer! Punctual to my time, you see, my
sweet little Damask Rose !
JOHN (coming down). A great deal more like a monthly one,
— constantly changing, and gone the moment you wear it.
ROSE. Impertinent creature !
FLAM. Who is this poetical cauliflower?
JOHN. Don't pretend not to know me. You know who I am,
well enough.
FLAM. As I live, it 's the Ox ! — retire, Ox, to your pasture,
and don't rudely disturb the cooing of the doves. Go and
graze, Ox !
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 335
8C. U]
JOHN. Suppose I choose to remain here, what then?
FLAM. Why then you must be driven off, mad Ox. (To
ROSE.) Who is that other grasshopper?
ROSE. Hush, hush ! for Heaven's sake don't let him hear you !
It 's young Edmunds.
FLAM. Young Edmunds? And who the devil is young Ed-
munds? For beyond the natural inference that young
Edmunds is the son of old Edmunds, curse me if the fame
of young Edmunds has ever reached my ears.
HOSE (in a low tone). It's Lucy's former lover, whom she
has given up for the squire.
FLAM. The rejected cultivator?
ROSE. The same.
FLAM. Ah! I guessed as much from his earthly appearance.
But, my darling Rose, I must speak with you, — I must —
(putting his arm round her waist, see* JOHN). Good-bye,
Ox!
JOHN. Good-bye!
FLAM. Pleasant walk to you, Ox!
JOHN, (not moving}. Thank 'ee; — same to you!
FLAM. That other clodpole must not stay here either.
ROSE. Yes, yes ! he neither sees nor hears us. Pray let him
remain.
FLAM (to JOHN). You understand, Ox, that it is my wish
that you forthwith retire and graze, — or in other words,
that you at once, and without delay, betake yourself to the
farm, or the devil, or any other place where you are in your
element, and won't be in the way.
JOHN. Oh yes, I understand that.
FLAM. Very well; then the sooner you create a scarcity of
such animals in this market, the better. Now, my dear
Rose (puts his arm round her waist again). Are you
gone, Ox?
JOHN. No.
FLAM. Are you going?
JOHN. By no means.
FLAM. This insolence is not to be borne.
ROSE. Oh, pray don't hurt him, — pray don't. Go away, you
stupid creature, if you don't want to be ruined.
336 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
JOHN. That's just the very advice I would give you, Rose;
do you go away, if you don't want to be ruined. As for
me, this is a public place, and here I '11 remain just as long
as I think proper.
FLAM (quitting ROSE, and advancing towards him). You
will?
JOHN. I will.
ROSE. Oh, dear, dear ! I knew he 'd be murdered all along. I
was quite certain of it.
JOHN. Don't frown and scowl at me, — it won't do, — it only
makes me smile; and when you talk of insolence and put
my blood up, I tell you at once, that I am not to be bullied.
FLAM. Bullied?
JOHN. Ay, bullied was the word, — bullied by a coward, if you
like that better.
FLAM. Coward! (Seizes his gun by the barrel, and aims a
blow at him, with the butt-end; EDMUNDS rushes forward,
and strikes it up with his stick. )
EDMUNDS. Hold your hand, sir, — hold your hand, or I '11 fell
you to the ground. Maddox, leave this place directly:
take the opposite path, and I '11 follow you. (Exit MAD-
DOX.) As for you, sir, who by the way of vindicating
yourself from the charge of cowardice, raise your gun
against an unarmed man, tell your protector, the Squire,
from me, that he and his companions might content them-
selves with turning the heads of our farmers' daughters,
and endeavouring to corrupt their hearts, without wan-
tonly insulting the men they have most injured. Let this
be a lesson to you, sir, — although you were armed, you
would have had the worst of a scuffle, and you may not
have the benefit of a third person's interference at so crit-
ical a moment, another time ; — remember this warning, sir,
and benefit by it. [Exit.
FLAM (aside). If Norton does not take a dear revenge for
this insult, I have lost my influence with him. Bully ! cow-
ard ! They shall rue it.
ROSE (with her apron to her eyes). Oh, Mr. Flam! I can't
bear to think that you should have suffered all this, on my
account.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 337
SC. II ]
FLAM (aside). On her account! — a little vanity! (To her.)
Suffered ! Why, my dear, it was the drollest and most hu-
morous affair that ever happened. Here stand I, — the
Honourable Sparkins Flam, — on this second day of Sep-
tember, one thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine; and
positively and solemnly declare that all the coffee-houses,
play-houses, faro-tables, brag-tables, assemblies, drums and
routs of a whole season put together, could not furnish
such a splendid piece of exquisite drollery. The idea is
admirable. My affecting to quarrel with a ploughman,
and submitting to be lectured by another caterpillar, whom
I suffer to burst into a butterfly importance !
ROSE. Then you were not really quarrelling?
FLAM. Bless you, no ! I was only acting.
ROSE. Lor3 ! how well you do act, to be sure.
FLAM. Come, let us retire into the house, or after this joke
we shall be the gaze of all the animated potatoes that are
planted in this hole of a village. Why do you hesitate,
Damask ?
ROSE. Why, I have just been thinking that if you go to all
these coffee-houses, and play-houses, and fairs, and brags,
and keep playing drums, and routing people about, you '11
forget me, when you go back to London.
FLAM (aside). More than probable. (To her.) Never fear;
you will be generally known as Rose the lovely, and I shall
be universally denominated Flam the constant.
Duet. — ROSE and SPAHKINS FLAM.
FLAM. 'Tis true I 'm caress'd by the witty,
The envy of all the fine beaux,
The pet of the court and the city,
But still I 'm the lover of Rose.
ROSE. Country sweethearts, oh, how I despise!
And oh ! how delighted I am
To think that I shine in the eyes
Of the elegant — sweet — Mr. Flam.
338 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
FLAM. Allow me (offers to kiss her).
ROSE. Pray don't be so bold, sir. (Kisses her.)
FLAM. What sweets on that honey'd lip hang!
ROSE. Your presumption, I know, I should scold, sir,
But I really can't scold Mr. Flam.
BOTH. Then let us be happy together,
Content with the world as it goes,
An unchangeable couple for ever,
Mr. Flam and his beautiful Rose. [Exeunt.
SCENE III. — The Farmer's Kitchen. A table and chairs.
Enter OLD BENSON and MARTIN.
BENSON. Well, Stokes. Now you have the opportunity you
have desired, and we are alone, I am ready to listen to the
information which you wished to communicate to my pri-
vate ear.
MARTIN. Exactly; — you said information, I think?
BENSON. You said information, or I have forgotten.
MARTIN. Just so, exactly; I said information. I did say
information, why should I deny it?
BENSON. I see no necessity for your doing so, certainly.
Pray go on.
MARTIN. Why, you see, my dear Mr. Benson, the fact is —
won't you be seated? Pray sit down (brings forward two
chairs; — they sit). There, now, — let me see, — where
was I?
BENSON. You were going to begin, I think.
MARTIN. Oh, — ah ! — so I w&s ; — I hadn't begun, had I ?
BENSON. No, no ! Pray begin again, if you had.
MARTIN. Well, then, what I have got to say is not so much
information, as a kind of advice, or suggestion, or hint,
or something of that kind; and it relates to — eh? — (look-
ing very mysterious).
BENSON. What?
MARTIN. Yes (nodding). Don't you think there 's something
wrong there?
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 339
BC. Ill]
BENSON. Where?
MARTIN. In that quarter.
BENSON. In what quarter? Speak more plainly, sir.
MARTIN. You know what a friendly feeling I entertain to
your family. You know what a very particular friend of
mine you are. You know how anxious I always am to
prevent anything going wrong.
BENSON. Well! (abruptly").
MARTIN. Yes, I see you 're very sensible of it, but I '11 take it
for granted: you needn't bounce and fizz about, in that
way, because it makes one nervous. Don't you think, now,
don't you think, that ill-natured people may say; — don't
be angry, you know, because if I wasn't a very particular
friend of the family, I wouldn't mention the subject on
any account ; — don't you think that ill-natured people may
say there 's something wrong in the frequency of ' the
Squire's visits here?
BENSON (starting up furiously). What!
MARTIN ( aside ) . Here he goes again !
BENSON. Who dares suspect my child?
MARTIN. Ah, to be sure, that 's exactly what I say. Who
dares ? Damme, I should like to see 'em !
BENSON. Is it you?
MARTIN. I! Bless you, no, not for the world! I! — Come,
that 's a good one. I only say what other people say, you
know ; that 's all.
BENSON. And what are these tales, that idle busy fools prate
of with delight, among themselves, caring not whose ears
they reach, so long as they are kept from the old man,
whose blindness — the blindness of a fond and doting father
— is subject for their rude and brutal jeering. What are
they?
MARTIN. Dear me, Mr. Benson, you keep me in a state of
perpetual excitement.
BENSON. Tell me, without equivocation, what do they say?
MARTIN. Why, they say they think it — not exactly wrong,
perhaps ; don't fly out, now— but among those remarkable
coincidences which do occur sometimes, that whenever you
go out of your house, the Squire and his friend should
340 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
come into it; that Miss Lucy and Miss Rose, in the long
walks they take every day, should be met and walked home
with by the same gentlemen ; that long after you have gone
to bed at night, the Squire and Mr. Sparkins Flam should
still be seen hovering about the lane and meadow ; and that
one of the lattice windows should be always open, at that
hour.
BENSON. This is all?
MARTIN. Ye — yes, — yes, that 's all.
BENSON. Nothing beside?
MARTIN. Eh?
BENSON. Nothing beside?
MARTIN. Why, there is something else, but I know you '11
begin to bounce about again, if I tell it you.
BENSON. No, no ! let me hear it all.
MARTIN. Why, then, they do say that the Squire has been
heard to boast that he had practised on Lucy's mind — that
when he bid her, she would leave her father and her home,
and follow him over the world.
BENSON. They lie ! Her breast is pure and innocent ! Her
soul is free from guilt ; her mind from blemish. They lie !
I '11 not believe it. Are they mad? Do they think that I
stand tamely by, .and look upon my child's disgrace?
Heaven ! do they know of what a father's heart is made ?
MARTIN. My dear Mr. Benson, if you —
BENSON. This coarse and brutal boast shall be disowned.
(Going; MARTIN stops him.)
MARTIN. My dear Mr. Benson, you know it may not have
been made after all, — my dear sir, —
BENSON (struggling). Unhand me, Martin! Made or not
made, it has gone abroad, fixing an infamous notoriety on
me and mine. I '11 hear its truth or falsehood from him-
self. (Breaks from him, and exit.)
MARTIN (solus). There'll be something decidedly wrong
here presently. Hallo ! here 's another very particular
friend in a fume.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 341
8C. Ill]
Enter YOUNG BENSON hastily.
MARTIN. Ah! my dear fellow, how —
YOUNG BENSON. Where is Lucy?
MARTIN. I don't know, unless she has walked out with the
Squire.
YOUNG BENSON. The Squire!
MARTIN. To be sure; she very often walks out with the
Squire. Very pleasant recreation walking out with the
Squire; — capital custom, an't it?
YOUNG BENSON. Where 's my father?
MARTIN. Why, upon my word, I am unable to satisfy your
curiosity in that .particular either. All I know of him is
that he whisked out of this room in a rather boisterous
and turbulent manner for an individual at his time of life,
some few seconds before you whisked in. But what 's the
matter? — you seem excited. Nothing wrong, is there?
YOUNG BENSON {aside). This treatment of Edmunds, and
Lucy's altered behaviour to him, confirm my worst fears.
Where is Mr. Norton?
MARTIN (calling off). Ah! to be sure, — where is Mr. Nor-
ton?
Enter SQUIRE.
SQUIRE. Mr. Norton is here. Who wishes to see him?
MARTIN. To be sure, sir. Mr. Norton is here: who wishes
to see him?
YOUNG BENSON. I do.
MARTIN. I don't. Old fellow, good-bye ! Mr. Norton, good
evening ! (Aside.) There '11 be something wrong here, in
a minute. [Exit.
SQUIRE. Well, young man?
YOUNG BENSON. If you contemplate treachery here, Mr.
Norton, look to yourself. My father is an old man; the
chief prop of his declining years is his child, — my sister.
For your actions here, sir, you shall render a dear account
to me.
SQUIRE. To you, peasant!
YOUNG BENSON. To me, sir. One other scene like that en-
acted by your creature, at your command, to-night, may
342 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
terminate more seriously to him. For your behaviour here
you are responsible to me.
SQUIRE. Indeed! Anything more, sir?
YOUNG BENSON. Simply this: — after injuring the old man
beyond reparation, and embittering the last moments of
his life, you may possibly attempt to shield yourself under
the paltry excuse, that, as a gentleman, you cannot descend
to take the consequences from my hand. You shall take
them from me, sir, if I strike you to the earth first.
[Exit.
SQUIRE. Fiery and valorous, indeed! As the suspicions of
the family are aroused, no time is to be lost: the girl must
be carried off to-night, if possible.' With Flam's as-
sistance and management, she may be speedily removed
from within the reach of these rustic sparks. In my cooler
moments, the reflection of the misery I may inflict upon the
old man makes my conduct appear base and dishonourable,
even to myself. Pshaw! hundreds have done the same
thing before me, who have been lauded and blazoned forth
as men of honour. Honour in such cases, — an idle tale ! —
a by -word ! Honour ! There is much to be gleaned from
old tales ; and the legend of the child and the old man speaks
but too truly.
Song. — SQUIRE NORTON.
The child and the old man sat alone
In the quiet peaceful shade
Of the old green boughs, that had richly grown
In the deep thick forest glade.
It was a soft and pleasant sound,
That rustling of the oak;
And the gentle breeze play'd lightly round,
As thus the fair boy spoke : —
'Dear father, what can honour be,
Of which I hear men rave?
Field, cell and cloister, land and sea,
The tempest and the grave: —
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 343
SO. II I J
It lives in all, 'tis sought in each,
'Tis never heard or seen :
Now tell me, father, I beseech,
What can this honour mean?*
'It is a name, — a name, my child, —
It lived in other days,
When men were rude, their passions wild,
Their sport, thick battle-frays.
When in armour bright, the warrior bold,
Knelt to his lady's eyes:
Beneath the abbey-pavement old
That warrior's dust now lies.
'The iron hearts of that old day
Have moulder'd in the grave;
And chivalry has pass'd away,
With knights so true and brave ;
The honour, which to them was life,
Throbs in no bosom now ;
It only gilds the gambler's strife,
Or decks the worthless vow.'1
£
Enter LUCY.
SQUIRE. Lucy, dear Lucy.
LUCY. Let me entreat you not to stay here, sir! you will be
exposed to nothing but insult and attack. Edmunds and
my brother have both returned, irritated at something that
has passed with my cousin Rose: — for my sake, — for my
sake, Mr. Norton, spare me the pain of witnessing what
will ensue, if they find you here. You little know what I
have borne already.
SQUIRE. For your sake, Lucy, I would do much; but why
should I leave you to encounter the passion and ill-will,
from which you would have me fly?
* In John Hullah's music to this song, the last two lines are printed
as follows: —
'The name adorns the gambler's strife,
Or gilds the worthless vow.' — ED.
344 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
LUCY. Oh, I can bear it, sir; I deserve it but too well.
SQUIRE. Deserve it. — you do yourself an injustice, Lucy.
No; rather let me remove you from a house where you
will suffer nothing but persecution, and confer upon you a
title which the proudest lady in the land might wear. Here
— here, on my knees (he bends on his knee, and seizes her
hand}.
Enter FLAM.
'SQUIRE (rising). Flam here!
'FLAM (aside). Upon my word! — I thought we had been get-
'ting on pretty well in the open air, but they 're beating us
'hollow here, under cover.
'SQUIRE. Lucy, but one word, i»nd I understand your de-
'cision.
'Lucy. I — I cannot subdue the feelings of uneasiness and dis-
'trust which the great difference between your honour's
'rank and mine awakens in my mind.
'SQUIRE. Difference! Hundreds of such cases happen every
'day!
'Lucy. Indeed!
'SQUIRE. Oh, 'tis a matter of general notoriety, — isn't it,
'Flam? •
'FLAM. No doubt of it. (Aside.) Don't exactly know yet
'what they are talking about, though.
'SQUIRE. A relation of my own, a man of exalted rank,
'courted a girl far his inferior in station but only beneath
'him in that respect. In all others she was on a footing
'of equality with himself, if not far above him.
'LucY. And were they married?
'FLAM (aside). Rather an important circumstance in the case.
'I do remember that.
'SQUIRE. They were, — after a time, when the resentment of
'his friends, occasioned by his forming such an attachment,
'had subsided, and he was able to acknowledge her, with-
'out involving the ruin of both.
'Lucy. They were married privately at first, then?
'FLAM (aside). I must put in a word here. Oh, yes, it was
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 345
ic. in]
'all comfortably arranged to everybody's satisfaction, —
'wasn't it, Norton?
'SQUIRE. Certainly. And a happy couple they were, weren't
'they, Flam?
TLAM. Happiest of the happy. As happy as (aside) — a
'separation could make them.
'SQUIRE. Hundreds of great people have formed similar at-
'tachments, — haven't they, Flam?
'FLAM. Undoubtedly. There was the Right Honourable
'Augustus Frederick Charles Thomson Camharado, and the
'German Baron Hyfenstyfenlooberhausen, and they were
'both married — (aside) to somebody else, first. Not to
'mention Damask and I, who are models of constancy. By
'the bye, I have lost sight of her, and I am interrupting
'you. (Aside to SQUIRE, as he goes out.) I came to tell
'you that she is ripe for an elopement, if you urge her
'strongly. Edmunds has been reproaching her to my
'knowledge. She '11 consent while her passion lasts.
['Exit.'
SQUIRE. Lucy, I wait your answer. One word from you,
and a few hours will place you far beyond the reach of
those who would fetter your choice and control your in-
clinations. You hesitate. Come, decide. The Squire's
lady, or the wife of Edmunds!
Duet. — LUCY and SQUIRE NORTON.
SQUIRE. In rich and lofty station shine,
Before his jealous eyes:
In golden splendour, lady mine,
This peasant youth despise.
LUCY (apart: the SQUIRE regarding her attentively).
Oh! it would be revenge indeed
With scorn his glance to meet.
I, I, his humble pleading heed!
I 'd spurn him from my feet.
346 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
SQUIRE. With love and rage her bosom 's torn,
And rash the choice will be ;
LUCY. With love and rage ray bosom 's torn,
And rash the choice will be.
SQUIRE. From hence she quickly must be borne,
Her home, her home, she '11 flee.
LUCY. Oh ! long shall I have cause to mourn
My home, my home, for thee!
Enter OLD BENSON.
BENSON. What do I see ! The Squire and Lucy.
SQUIRE. Listen. A chaise and four fleet horses, under the
direction of a trusty friend of mine, will be in waiting on
the high road, at the corner of the Elm-Tree avenue, to-
night, at ten o'clock. They shall bear you whither we
can be safe, and in secret, by the first light of morning.
LUCY. His cruel harshness ; — it would be revenge, indeed.
But my father — my poor old father !
SQUIRE. Your father is prejudiced in Edmund's favour;
and so long as he thinks there is any chance of your being
his, he will oppose your holding communication with me.
Situated as you are now, you only stand in the way of his
wealth and advancement. Once 'fly with me, and in four-
'and-twenty hours you will be his pride, his boast, his sup-
'port.
OLD BENSON coming' forward.
BENSON. It is a lie, a base lie! — (LucY shrieks and throws
herself at his feet.) My pride! my boast! She would be
my disgrace, my shame : an outcast from her father's roof,
and from the world. Support ! — support me with the gold
coined in her infamy and guilt! Heaven help me! Have
I cherished her for this !
LUCY (clinging to him). Father! — dear, dear father!
SQUIRE. Hear me speak, Benson. Be calm.
BENSON. Calm ! — Do you know that from infancy I have
almost worshipped her, fancying that I saw in her young
mind the virtues of a mother, to whom the anguish of this
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 347
SC. Ill]
one hour would have been worse than death ! Calm !— do
you know that I have a heart and soul within me ; or do you
believe that because I am of lower station, I am a being of
a different order from yourself, and that Nature has de-
nied me thought and feeling! Calm! Man, do you
know that I am this girl's father?
SQUIRE. Benson, if you will not hear me, at least do not,
by hastily exposing this matter, deprive me of the inclina-
tion of making you some reparation.
BENSON. Reparation! You need be thankful, sir, for the
grasp she has upon my arm. Money ! If she were dying
for want, and the smallest coin from you could restore her
to life and health, sooner than she should take it from your
hand, I would cast her from a sick bed to perish on the
road-side.
SQUIRE. Benson, a word.
BENSON. Do not, I caution you; do not talk to me, sir. I
am an old man, but I do not know what passion may make
me do.
SQUIRE. These are high words, Benson. A farmer !
BENSON. Yes, sir; a farmer, one of the men on whom you,
and such as you, depend for the money they squander in
profligacy and idleness. A farmer, sir! I care not for
your long pedigree of ancestors, — my forefathers made
them all. Here, neighbours, friends! (ROSE, MADDOX,
STOKES, Villagers, etc., crowd on the stage.) Hear this,
hear this! your landlord, a high-born gentleman, enter-
ing the houses of your humble farmers, and tempting
their daughters to destruction!
Enter YOUNG BENSON and GEORGE EDMUNDS.
YOUNG BENSON. What 's that I hear? (rushing towards the
SQUIRE, STOKES interposes).
MARTIN. Hallo, hallo! Take hold of the other one, John.
(MADDOX and he remove- them to opposite sides of the
stage.) Hold him tight, John, hold him tight. Stand
still, there's a good fellow. Keep back, Squire. Knew
there 'd be something wrong, — ready to come in at the
nick of time, — capital custom.
318 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT i
FLAM enters and stands next the SQUIRE.
SQUIRE. Exposed, baited! Benson, are you mad? Within
the last few hours my friend here has been attacked and
insulted on the very land you hold, by a person in your
employ and young Edmunds there. I, too, have been
threatened and insulted in the presence of my tenantry and
workmen. Take care you do not drive me to extremities.
Remember — the lease of this farm for seventy years, which
your father took of mine, expires to-morrow; and that I
have the power to refuse its renewal. Again I ask you,
are you mad?
BENSON. Quit my house, villain 1
SQUIRE. Villain ! quit my house, then. This farm is mine :
and you and yours shall depart from under its roof, before
the sun has set to-morrow. (BENSON sinks into a chair in
centre, and covers his face with his hands.)
Sestet and Chorus.
LUCY — ROSE — EDMUNDS — SQUIRE NORTON — FLAM —
YOUNG BENSON — and Chortis.
YOUNG BENSON. Turn him from the farm ! From his home
will you cast
The old man who has till'd it for years ?
Every tree, every flower, is link'd with the past,
And a friend of his childhood appears.
Turn him from the farm ! O'er its grassy hill-side,
A gay boy he once loved to range ;
His boyhood has fled, and its dear friends are dead,
But these meadows have never known change.
EDMUNDS. Oppressor, hear me.
LUCY. On my knees I implore
SQUIRE. I command it, and you will obey.
ROSE. Rise, dear Lucy, rise; you shall not kneel before
The tyrant who drives us away.
SQUIRE. Your sorrows are useless, your prayers are hi
vain;
I command it and you will begone.
I '11 hear no more.
8c THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 349
EDMUNDS. No, they shall not beg again,
Of a man whom I view with deep scorn.
FLAM. Do not yield.
YOUNG BENSON. 1
SQUIRE. I
LUCY. | Leave the farm!
ROSE.
EDMUNDS. Your power I despise.
SQUIRE. And your threats, boy, I disregard, too.
FLAM. Do not yield.
YOUNG BENSON. "]
SQUIRE. I
LUCY. Leave the farm!
ROSE. J
ROSE. If he leaves it, he dies.
EDMUNDS. This base act, proud man, you shall rue.
YOUNG BENSON. Turn him from the farm ! From his home
will you cast
The old man who has till'd it for years?
Every tree, every flower, is link'd with the past,
And a friend of his childhood appears !
SQUIRE. Yes, yes, leave the farm ! From his home I will cast
The old man who has till'd it for years ;
Though each tree and flower is link'd with the past,
And a friend of his childhood appears.
Chorus.
He has turn'd from his farm, from his home he has cast
The old man who has till'd it for years ;
Though each tree and flower is link'd with the past,
And a friend of his childhood appears.
END OF THE FIRST ACT
350 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
ACT II
SCENE I. — An Apartment in the Hall. A breakfast-table,
with urn and tea-service. A Livery Servant arrang-
ing it. FLAM, in a morning gown and slippers, reclin-
ing on the sofa.
FLAM. Is the Squire out of bed yet?
SERVANT. Yes, sir, he will be down directly.
FLAM. Any letters from London?
SERVANT. One for your honour, that the man brought over
from the market-town, this morning.
FLAM. Give it me, blockhead! (Servant gives it, and exit.)
Never like the look of a great official-folded letter, with a
large seal, 'it 's always an unpleasant one. Talk of dis-
'covering a man's character from his handwriting ! — I '11
'back myself against any odds to form a very close guess
'at the contents of a letter from the form into which it is
'folded. This, now, I should say, is a decidedly hostile
'fold.' Let us see — 'King's Bench Walk — September 1st,
1729. Sir, I am instructed by my client, Mr. Edward
Montague, to apply to you — (the old story — for the im-
mediate payment, I suppose — what's this?) — to apply to
you for the instant restitution of the sum of two hundred
and fifty pounds, his son lost to you at play; and to
acquaint you, that unless it is immediately forwarded to
my office, as above, the circumstances of the transaction
will be made known ; and the unfair and fraudulent means
by which you deprived the young man of his money, pub-
licly advertised. — I am, Sir, your obedient Servant, John
Ellis.' The devil! 'who would believe now, that such a
'trifling circumstance as the mere insinuation of a small
'piece of gold into the corner of two dice would influence
'a man's destiny !' What 's to be done? If, by some dex-
trous stroke, I could manage to curry favour with Norton,
and procure some handsome present in return for services
rendered, — for, 'work and labour done and performed,'
as my obedient servant, John Ellis, would say, I might
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 351
SC. I]
keep my head above water yet. I have it ! He shall have
a joyful surprise. I'll carry this girl off for him, and
he shall know nothing of the enterprise until it is com-
pleted, or at least till she is fairly off. I have been well
rewarded for similar services before, and may securely
calculate on his gratitude in the present instance. He is
here. (Puts up the letter.)
Enter SQUIRE NORTON.
SQUIRE (seating himself at table). Has any application for
permission to remain on the farm been made from Benson,
this morning, Flam?
FLAM. None.
SQUIRE. I am very sorry for it, although I admire the old
man's independent spirit. I am very sorry for it.
Wrong as I know I have been, I would rather that the
first concession came from him.
FLAM. Concession!
SQUIRE. The more I reflect upon the occurrences of yester-
day, Flam, the more I regret that, under the influence of
momentary passion and excitement, I should have used so
uncalled-for a threat against my father's oldest tenant. It
is an act of baseness to which I look back with abhorrence.
FLAM (aside). What weathercock morality is this !
SQUIRE. It was unnecessary violence.
FLAM. Unnecessary ! Oh, certainly ; no doubt you could
have attained your object without it, and can still. There
is no occasion to punish the old man.
SQUIRE. Nor will I. He shall not leave the farm, if I my-
self implore, and beg him to remain.
Enter Servant.
SERVANT. Two young women to speak with your honour.
Enter LUCY and ROSE.
SQUIB E. Lucy!
FLAM (aside). She must be carried off to-night, or she cer-
tainly will save me the trouble, and I shall lose the money.
352 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
LUCY. Your honour may be well surprised to see me here,
after the events of yesterday. It has cost me no trifling
struggle to take this step, but I hope my better feelings
have at length prevailed, and conquered my pride and
weakness. I wish to speak to your honour, with nobody
by.
FLAM (aside). Nobody by! I rather suspect I'm not par-
ticularly wanted here. (To them.) Pray allow us to re-
tire for a few moments. Rose, my dear.
ROSE. Well!
FLAM. Come along.
LUCY. Rose will remain here, I brought her for that purpose.
FLAM. Bless me ! that 's very odd. As you please, of course,
but I really think you '11 find her very much in the way.
(Aside.) Acting propriety! So much the better for my
purpose ; a little coyness will enhance the value of the prize.
[Exit FLAM.
LUCY. Mr. Norton, I come here to throw myself upon your
honourable feelings, as a man and as a gentleman. Oh,
sir! now that my eyes are opened to the misery into which
I have plunged myself, by my own ingratitude and
treachery, do not — do not add to it the reflection that I
have driven my father in his old age from the house where
he was born, and in which he hoped to have died.
SQUIRE. Be calm, Lucy; your father shall continue to hold
the farm; the lease shall be renewed.
LUCY. I have more to say to your honour still, and what I
have to add may even induce your honour to retract the
promise you have just now made me.
SQUIRE. Lucy! what can you mean?
LUCY. Oh, sir ! call me coquette, faithless, treacherous, deceit-
ful, what you will; I deserve it all; — but believe me, I
speak the truth when I make the humiliating avowal. A
weak, despicable vanity induced me to listen with a ready
ear to your honour's addresses, and to cast away the best
and noblest heart that ever woman won.
SQUIRE. Lucy, 'twas but last night you told me that your
love for Edmunds had vanished into air; that you hated
and despised him.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 358
•c. ij
LUCY. I know it, sir, too well. He laid bare ray own guilt,
and showed me the ruin which impended over me. He
spoke the truth. Your honour more than confirmed him.
SQUIRE (after a pawe). Even the avowal you have just
made, unexpected as it is, shall not disturb my resolution.
Your father shall not leave the farm.
Quartet.
LUCY — ROSE — SQUIRE NORTON, and afterwards YOUNO
BENSON.
SQUIRE. Hear me, when I swear that the farm is your own
Through all changes Fortune may make;
The base charge of falsehood I never have known ;
This promise I never will break.
ROSE and LUCY. Hear him, when he swears that the farm is
our own
Through all changes Fortune may make;
The base charge of falsehood he never has known ;
This promise he never will break.
Enter YOUNG BENSON.
YOUNG BENSON. My sister here ! Lucy ! begone, I command.
SQUIRE, To your home I restore you again.
YOUNG BENSON. No boon I '11 accept from that treacherous
hand
As the price of my sister's fair fame.
SQUIRE. To your home !
YOUNG BENSON (to LUCY). Hence away!
LUCY. Brother dear, I obey.
SQUIRE. I restore.
YOUNG BENSON. Hence away!
YOUNG BENSON, ROSE, and LUCY. Let us leave.
LUCY. He swears it, dear brother.
SQUIRE. I swear &-
YOUNG BENSON. Away.
SQUIRE. I -swear it.
YOUNG BENSON. You swear to deceive.
354 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT H
SQUIRE. Hear me, when I swear that the farm is your own
Through all changes Fortune may make.
LUCY and ROSE. Hear him when he swears that the farm is
our own.
Through all changes Fortune may make.
YOUNG BENSON. Hear him swear, hear him swear, that the
farm is our own
Through all changes Fortune may make.
SQUIRE. The base charge of falsehood I never have known,
This promise I never will break.
LUCY and ROSE. The base charge of falsehood he never has
known,
This promise he never will break.
YOUNG BENSON, The base charge of falsehood he often has
known
This promise he surely will break.
[Exeunt omnes.
Re-enter FLAM, in a walking-dress.
FLAM. The coast is clear at last. What on earth the con-
versation can have been, at which Rose was wanted, and I
was not, I confess my inability to comprehend; but away
with speculation, and now to business. — (Rings.)
Enter Servant.
Pen and ink.
SERVANT. Yes, sir. [Exit Servant.
FLAM (solus). Nearly all the tenantry will be assembled here
at the ball to-night; and if the father of this rustic Ddl-
cinea is reinstated in his farm, he and his people will no
doubt be among the number. It will be easy enough to
entice the girl into the garden, through the window open-
ing on the lawn ; a chaise can be waiting in the quiet lane
at the side, and some trusty fellow can slip a hasty note
into Norton's hands informing him of the flight, and nam-
ing the place at which he can join us. (Re-enter Servant
with pen, ink, taper and two sheets of notepaper; he places
them on the table and exit.) I may as well reply to my
friend Mr. John Ellis's obliging favour now, too, by
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 355
sc. ij
promising that the money shall be forwarded in the course
of three days' post. (Takes the letter from his pocket, and
lays it on the table.} Lie you there. First, for Norton's
note. — 'Dear Norton, — knowing your wishes — seized the
girl — no blame attach to you. Join us as soon as people
have dispersed in search of her in all directions but the
right one, — fifteen miles off.' (Folds it ready for an
envelope and lays it by the side of the other letter. ) Now
for John Ellis. Why, what does the rascal mean by
bringing but two sheets of paper? No matter: that affair
will keep cool till to-morrow, when I have less business on
my hands, and more money in my pockets, I hope.
(Crumples the letter he has just rewritten, hastily up, thrusts
it into his pocket, and folds the wrong one in the envelope.
As he is sealing it
Enter MARTIN, very cautiously.
MARTIN (peeping}. There he is, hatching some mysterious
and diabolical plot. If I can only get to the bottom of
these dreadful designs, I shall immortalise myself. What
a lucky dog I am, to be such a successful gleaner of news,
and such a confidential person into the bargain, as to be
the first to hear that he wanted some trustworthy person.
All comes of talking to everybody I meet, and drawing
out everything they hear. Capital custom! He don't
see me. Hem ! (Coughs very loud, and when FLAM looks
round, nods familiarly.) How are you again r
FLAM. How am I again! Who the devil are you? — and
what do you want here?
MARTIN. Hush !
FLAM. Eh?
MARTIN. Hush ! I 'm the man.
FLAM. The man !
MARTIN. Yes, the man that you asked the ostler at the
George to recommend you; the trustworthy man that
knows all the by-roads well, and can keep a secret; the
man that you wanted to lend you a hand in a job that —
FLAM. Hush, hush!
MARTIN. Oh ! you 're beginning to hush now, are you?
356 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
FLAM. Haven't I seen your face before?
MARTIN. To be sure you have. You recollect admiring my
manners at Benson's yesterday. You must remember Mr.
Martin Stokes. You can't have forgotten him — not
possible !
FLAM (aside). A friend of Benson! — a dangerous rencontre.
Another moment, and our conversation might have taken an
awkward turn. (To him.) So you are Stokes, eh? Ben-
son's friend Stokes?
MARTIN. To be sure. Ha, ha ! I knew you couldn't have
forgotten me. Pleasant Stokes they call me, clever Stokes
sometimes ; — but that 's flattery.
FLAM. No, surely.
MARTIN. Yes, 'pon my life! it is. Can't bear flattery, —
don't like it at all.
FLAM. Well, Mr. Stokes—
MARTIN (aside). Now for the secret.
FLAM. I am very sorry you have had the trouble of coming
up here, Mr. Stokes, because I have changed my plan, and
shall not require your valuable services. (Goes up to the
table.)
MARTIN (aside). Something wrong here: try him again,
You're sure you don't want me?
FLAM. Quite.
MARTIN. That 's unlucky, because, as I have quarrelled with
Benson —
FLAM. Quarrelled with Benson!
MARTIN. What! didn't you know that?
FLAM. Never heard of it. Now I think of it, Mr. Stokes, 1
shall want your assistance. Pray, sit down, Mr. Stokes.
MARTIN. With pleasure. (They sit.) I say, I thought you
wanted me.
FLAM. Ah ! you 're a sharp fellow.
MARTIN. You don't mean that?
FLAM. I do, indeed.
MARTIN (aside). You would, if you knew all.
FLAM (aside). Conceited hound !
MARTIN (aside). Poor devil!
FLAM. Mr. Stokes, I needn't impress upon a gentleman of
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 357
SC. l]
your intelligence, the necessity of secrecy in this matter.
MARTIN. Of course not: see all — say nothing. Capital cus-
tom:— (aside) not mine though. Go on.
FLAM. You wouldn't mind playing Benson a trick, — just a
harmless trick?
'MARTIN. Certainly not. Go on.
TLAM. I'll trust you.
'MARTIN. So you may. Go on.5
FLAM. A chaise and four will be waiting to-night, at ten
o'clock precisely, at the little gate that opens from the gar-
den into the lane.
'MARTIN. No: will it though? Go on.'
FLAM. 'Don't interrupt me, Stokes.' Into that chaise you
must assist me in forcing as quickly as possible and without
noise —
'MARTIN. Yes. Go on.
'FLAM. Whom do you think?
'MARTIN. Don't know.'
FLAM. Can't you guess whom?
MARTIN. No.
FLAM. Try.
MARTIN. Eh! what! — Miss —
FLAM. Hush, hush ! You understand me, I see. Not another
word ; not another syllable.
MARTIN. But do you really mean to run away with —
FLAM (stopping his mouth,). You understand me; — that's
quite sufficient.
MARTIN (aside). He's going to run away with Rose. Why,
if I hadn't found this out, John Maddox, — one of my most
particular friends, — would have gone stark, staring, raving
mad with grief. ( To him. ) But what will become of Miss
Lucy, when she has lost Rose?
FLAM. No matter. We cannot take them both, without the
certainty of an immediate discovery. 'Meet me at the cor-
'ner of the avenue, before the ball commences, and I will
'communicate any further instructions I may have to give
'you. Meanwhile' take this (gives him. money) as an
earnest of what you shall receive when the girl is secured.
Remember, silence and secrecy.
358 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT n
MARTIN. Silence and secrecy, (exit FLAM) — confidence and
two guineas. I am perfectly bewildered with this tremen-
dous secret. What shall I do? Where shall I go? — To my
particular friend, old Benson, or young Benson, or George
Edmunds ? or — no ; I '11 go and paralyse my particular
friend, John Maddox. Not a moment is to be lost. I am
all in a flutter. Run away with Rose ! I suppose he '11 run
away with Lucy next. 7 shouldn't wonder. Run away
with Rose ! I never did — [Exit hastily.
SCENE II. — An open spot in ihe Village.
Enter SQUIRE NORTON.
SQUIRE. My mind is made up. This girl has opened her whole
heart to me; and it would be worse than villainy to pursue
her further. I will seek out Benson and Edmunds, and en-
deavour to repair the mischief my folly has occasioned. I
have sought happiness in the dissipation of crowded cities,
in vain. A country life offers health and cheerfulness ; and
a country life shall henceforth be mine, in all seasons.
Song. — SQUIRE NORTON.
There 's a charm in Spring, when everything
Is bursting from the ground;
When pleasant showers bring forth the flowers,
And all is life around.
In summer day, the fragrant hay
Most sweetly scents the breeze ;
And all is still, save murmuring rill,
Or sound of humming bees.
Old Autumn come, with trusty gun.
In quest of birds we roam :
Unerring aim, we mark the game,
And proudly bear it home.
A winter's night has its delight.
Well warm'd to bed we go ;
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 359
•C. Ill]
A winter's day, we 're blithe and gay,
Snipe-shooting in the snow.
A country life without the strife
And noisy din of town,
Is all I need, I take no heed
Of splendour or renown.
And when I die, oh, let me lie
Where trees above me wave ;
Let wild plants bloom, around my tomb,
My quiet country grave! [Exit.
SCENE III. — The Rick-yard. Same as ACT I. SCENE I.
EDMUNDS and MADDOX meeting.
JOHN. Ah, George ! Why this is kind to come down to the old
farm to-day, and take one peep at us, before we leave it for
ever. I suppose it 's fancy, now, George, but to my think-
ing I never saw the hedges look so fresh, the fields so rich,
or the old house so pretty and comfortable, as they do this
morning. It 's fancy that, George, — an't it?
EDMUNDS. It 's a place you may well be fond of, and attached
to, for it 's the prettiest spot in all the country round.
JOHN. Ah ! you always enter into my feelings ; and speaking
of that, I want to ask your advice about Rose. I meant to
come up to you to-day, on purpose. Do you think she is
fond of me, George?
EDMUNDS (smiling). What do you think? She has not shown
any desperate warmth of affection, of late, has she?
JOHN. No — no, she certainly has not, but she used to once,
and the girl has got a good heart after all ; and she came
crying to me, this morning, in the little paddock, and some-
how or other, my heart melted towards her; and — and —
there's something very pleasant about her manner, — isn't
there, George?
EDMUNDS. No doubt of it, as other people besides ourselves
would appear to think.
JOHN. You mean Mr. Flam? ( EDMUNDS nods assent.) Ah!
360 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
it 's a bad business, altogether ; but still there are some ex-
cuses to be made for a young country girl, who has never
seen a town gentleman before, and can't be expected to
know as well as you and I, George, what the real worth of
one is. However that may be, Rose came into the little
paddock this morning, as I was standing there, looking at
the young colts, and thinking of all our misfortunes ; and
first of all she walked by me, and then she stopped at a little
distance, and then she walked back, and stopped again;
and I heard her sobbing as if her heart would burst: and
then she came a little nearer, and at last she laid her hand
upon my arm, and looked up in my face: and the tears
started into my eyes, George, and I couldn't bear it any
longer, for I thought of the many pleasant days we had
been happy together, and it hurt me to think that she should
ever have done anything to make her afraid of me, or me
unkind to her.
EDMUNDS. You 're a good fellow, John, an excellent fellow.
Take her; I believe her to have an excellent disposition,
though it is a little disguised by girlish levity sometimes ; —
you may safely take her, — if she had far less good feeling
than she actually possesses, she could never abuse your kind
and affectionate nature.
JOHN. Is that your advice? Givft me your hand, George
(they shake hands), I will take her. You shall dance at our
wedding, and I don't quite despair yet of dancing at yours,
at the same time.
EDMUNDS. At mine ! Where is the old man ? I came here to
offer him the little cottage in the village, which belongs to
me. There is no tenant in it now : it has a pretty garden,
of which I know he is fond, and it may serve his turn till
he has had time to look about him.
JOHN. He is somewhere about the farm ; walk with me across
the yard, and perhaps we may meet him — this way.
[Exeunt.
Enter YOUNG BENSON.
YOUNG BENSON. The worst portion of the poor old man's
hard trial is past. I have lingered with him in every field
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 361
SC. Ill]
on the land, and wandered through every room in the old
house. I can neither blame his grief, nor console him in his
affliction, for the farm has been the happy scene of my birth
and boyhood ; and I feel, in looking on it, for the last time,
as if I were leaving the dearest friends of my youth, for
ever.
Song. — YOUNG BENSON.
My fair home is no longer mine ;
From its roof-tree I 'm driven away,
Alas ! who will tend the old vine,
Which I planted in infancy's day !
The garden, the beautiful flowers,
The oak with its branches on high,
Dear friends of my happiest hours,
Among ye, I long hoped to die.
The briar, the moss, and the bramble,
Along the green paths will run wild:
The paths where I once used to ramble,
An innocent, light-hearted child.
At the conclusion of the song enter to the symphony Ou>
BENSON, with LUCY and ROSE.
YOUNG BENSON (advancing to meet him). Come, father,
come!
OLD BENSON. I am ready, boy. We have but to walk a few
steps, and the pang of leaving is over. Come, Rose, bring
on that unhappy girl ; come !
As they are going, enter the SQUIRE, who meets them.
SQUIRE. I am in time.
BENSON (to YOUNG BENSON, who M advancing). Harry,
stand back. Mr. Norton, if by this visit you intend to
mock the misery you have inflicted here, it is a heartless
insult that might have been spared.
SQUIRE. You do me an injustice, Benson. I come here, — not
to insult your grief, but to entreat, implore you, to remain.
The lease of this farm shall be renewed ; — I beseech you to
remain here.
362 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT n
BENSON. It is not the quitting even the home of my infancy,
which most men love, that bows my spirit down to-day.
Here, in this old house, for near two hundred years, my an-
cestors have lived and died, and left their names behind
them free from spot or blemish. I am the first to cross its
threshold with the brand of infamy upon me. Would to
God I had been borne from its porch a senseless corpse many
weary years ago, so that I had been spared this hard calam-
ity ! You have moved an old man's weakness, but not with
your revenge, sir. You implore me to remain here. I
spurn your offer. Here! A father yielding to the de-
stroyer of his child's good name and honour ! Say no more,
sir. Let me pass.
Enter, behind, STOKES and EDMUNDS.
SQUIRE. Benson, you are guilty of the foulest injustice, not
to me, but to your daughter. After her fearless confession
to me this morning of her love for Edmunds, and her ab-
horrence of my professions, I honour her too much to injure
her, or you.
LUCY. Dear father, it is true indeed. The noble behaviour
of his honour to me, this morning, I can never forget, or be
too grateful for.
BENSON. Thank God ! thank God ! I can look upon her once
again. My child! my own child! (Tie embraces Tier with
great emotion.) I have done your honour wrong, and I
hope you '11 forgive me. ( They shake hands. )
MARTIN (running forward). So have I! so have I! I have
done his honour wrong, and I hope he '11 forgive me too.
You don't leave the farm, then? Hurrah! (A man carry-
ing a pail, some harness, etc., crosses the stage.) Hallo,
young fellow ! go back, go back ! don't take another thing
away, and bring back all you have carried off; they are
going to stop in the farm. Hallo ! you fellows ! ( Calling
off.) Leave the barn alone, and put everything in its place.
They are going to stop in the farm. [Exit bawling.
BENSON (seeing EDMUNDS). What! George here, and turning
away from his old friend, too, without a look of congratu-
lation or a shake of the hand, just at the time, when of all
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 863
^ inj
others, he had the best right to expect it! For shame,
George, for shame !
EDMUNDS. My errand here is rendered useless. By accident,
and not intentionally, I partly overheard just now the na-
ture of the avowal made by your daughter to Mr. Norton
this morning.
BENSON. You believe it, George. You cannot doubt its
truth.
EDMUNDS. I do believe it. But I have been hurt, slighted, set
aside for another. My honest love has been despised; my
affection has been remembered, only to be tried almost be-
yond endurance. Lucy, all this from you I freely forgive.
Be what you have been once, and what you may so well be-
come again. Be the high-souled woman ; not the light and
thoughtless trifler that disgraces the name. Let me see
you this, and you are mine again. Let me see you what you
have been of late, and I never can be yours !
BENSON. Lead her in, Rose. Come, dear, come! (The BEN-
SONS and ROSE lead her slowly away.)
EDMUNDS. Mr. Norton, if this altered conduct be sincere, it
deserves a much better return than my poor thanks can
ever be to you. If it be feigned, to serve some purposes
of your own, the consequences will be upon your head.
SQUIRE. And I shall be prepared to meet them.
Duet. — SQUIRE NORTON and EDMUNDS.
SQUIRE. Listen, though I do not fear you,
Listen to me, ere we part.
EDMUNDS. List to you! Yes, I will hear you.
SQUIRE. Yours alone is Lucy's heart,
I swear it, by that Heaven above me.
EDMUNDS. What ! can I believe my ears !
Could I hope that she still loves me !
SQUIRE. Banish all these doubts and fears,
If a love were e'er worth gaining,
364 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
If love were ever fond and true,
No disguise or passion feigning,
Such is her young love for you.
Listen, though I do not fear you,
Lister to me ere we part.
EDMUNDS. List to you ! yes, I will hear you,
Mine alone is her young heart.
[Exeunt severally.
SCENE IV. — The avenue leading to the Hall, by moonlight.
The house in the distance, gaily illuminated.
Enter FLAM and MARTIN.
FLAM. You have got the letter I gave you for the Squire ?
MARTIN. All right. Here it is.
FLAM. The moment you see me leave the room, slip it into
the Squire's hand; you can easily do so, without being rec-
ognised, in the confusion of the dance, and then follow me.
You perfectly understand your instructions?
MARTIN. Oh, yes, — I understand them well enough.
FLAM. There 's nothing more, then, that you want to know?
MARTIN. No, nothing, — oh, yes there is. I want to know
whether — whether —
FLAM. Well, go on.
MARTIN. Whether you could conveniently manage to let me
have another couple of guineas, before you go away in the
chaise. Payment beforehand, — capital custom. And if
you don't, perhaps I may not get them at all, you know:
(aside) seeing that I don't intend to go at all, I think it 's
very likely.
FLAM. You 're a remarkably pleasant fellow, Stokes, in gen-
eral conversation, — very, — but when you descend into par-
ticularities, you become excessively prosy. On some points,
— money-matters for instance, — you have a very grasping
imagination, and seem disposed to dilate upon them at too
great a length. You must cure yourself of this habit, —
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 365
SC. IV]
you must indeed. Good-bye, Stokes ; you shall have the
two guineas doubled when the journey is completed. Re-
member,—ten o'clock. [Exit FLAM.
MARTIN. I shan't forget ten o'clock, depend upon it. Now
to burst upon my particular friend, Mr. John Maddox, with
the awful disclosure. He must pass this way on his road to
the Hall. Here they come, — don't see him though.
(Groups of male and female Villagers in cloaks, etc., cross
the stage on their "way to the Hall. )
MARTIN. How are you, Tom? How do, Will?
VILLAGERS. How do, Mas'r Stokes?
MARTIN (shaking hands with them}. How do, Susan? Mind,
Gary, you 're my first partner. Always kiss your first part-
ner,— capital custpm. (Kisses her.) Good-bye! See you
up at the Hall.
VILLAGERS. Ay, ay, Mas'r Stokes. [Exeunt Villagers.
MARTIN. Not among them. (More Villagers cross.) Nor
them. Here he comes : — Rose with him too, — innocent lit-
tle victim, little thinking of the atrocious designs that are
going on against her!
Enter MADDOX and ROSE, arm-in-arm.
JOHN. Ha, ha, ha! that was a good 'un, — wasn't it! Ah!
Martin, I wish I 'd seen you a minute ago. I made such a
joke! How you would ha' laughed!
MARTIN (mysteriously beckoning MADDOX away from ROSE,
and whispering). I want to speak to you.
JOHN (whispering). What about?
ROSE. Lor' ! don't stand whispering there, John. If you have
anything to say, Mr. Stokes, say it before me.
JOHN (taking her arm). Ah! say it before her! Don't mind
her, Martin ; she 's to be my wife, you know, and we 're to
be on the mutual-confidence principle ; an't we, — Rose ?
ROSE. To be sure. Why don't you speak, Mr. Stokes? I
suppose it 's the old story, — something wrong.
MARTIN. Something wrong ! I rather think there is ; and you
little know what it is, or you wouldn't look so merry. What
I have got to say— -don't be frightened, Miss Rose, — re-
lates to — don't alarm yourself, Master Maddox.
366 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
JOHN. I aivt alarming myself ; you 're alarming me. Go on !
ROSE. Go on! — can't you?
MARTIN. Relates to Mr. Flam.
JOHN (dropping ROSE'S arm). Mr. Flam!
MARTIN. Hush ! — and Miss Rose.
ROSE. Me! Me and Mr. Flam!
MARTIN. Mr. Flam intends at ten o'clock, this very night, —
don't be frightened, Miss, — by force, in secret, and in a
chaise and four, too, — to carry off, against her will, and
elope with, Miss Rose.
ROSE. Me! Oh! (Screams, and falls into the arms of MAD-
DOX.)
JOHN, Rub her hands, Martin, she 's going off in a fit.
MARTIN. Never mind ; she 'd better go off in a fit than a
chaise.
ROSE (recovering). Oh, John ! don't let me go.
JOHN. Let you go ! — not if I set the whole Hall on fire.
ROSE. Hold me fast, John.
JOHN. I '11 hold you fast enough, depend upon it.
ROSE. Come on the other side of me, Mr. Stokes: take my
arm; hold me tight, Mr. Stokes.
MARTIN. Don't be frightened, I '11 take care of you. ( Takes
her arm.)
ROSE. Oh ! Mr. Stokes.
MARTIN. Oh, indeed ! Nothing wrong, — eh ?
ROSE. Oh! Mr. Stokes, — pray forgive my having doubted
that there was — Oh! what a dreadful thing! What is to
be done with me?
MARTIN. Upon my word, I don't know. I think we had bet-
ter shut her up in some place under ground, — hadn't we,
John ? — or, stay, — suppose we borrow the keys of the fam-
ily vault, and lock her up there, for an hour or two.
JOHN. Capital!
ROSE. Lor' ! surely you may find out some more agreeable
place than that, John.
MARTIN. I have it. — I 'm to carry her off.
BOTH. You!
MARTIN. Me, — don't be afraid of me: — all my management.
You dance with her all the evening, and I '11 keep close to
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 367
SC. IV J
you. If anybody tries to get her away, you knock him
down, — and I '11 help you.
JOHN. That 's the plan ; — come along.
ROSE. Oh, I am so frightened ! Hold me fast, Mr. Stokes, —
Don't let me go, John ! [Exeunt, talking.
Enter LUCY.
LUCY. Light-hearted revellers ! how I envy them ! How pain-
ful is my situation, — obliged with a sad heart to attend a
festivity, from which the only person I would care to meet
will, I know, be absent. 'But I will not complain. He
'shall see that I can become worthy of him, once again. I
'have lingered here so long, watching the soft shades of
'evening as they closed around me, that I cannot bear the
'thought of exchanging this beautiful scene for the noise
'and glare of a crowded room.'
Song. — LUCY.
How beautiful at even-tide
To see the twilight shadows pale,
Steal o'er the landscape, far and wide,
O'er stream and meadow, mound and dale,
How soft is Nature's calm repose
When evening skies their cool dews weep :
The gentlest wind more gently blows,
As if to soothe her in her sleep 1
The gay morn breaks,
Mists roll away,
All Nature awakes
To glorious day.
In my breast alone
Dark shadows remain;
The peace it has known
It can never regain.
SCENE THE LAST. — A spacious ball-room, brilliantly il-
luminated. A window at the end, through which w seen a
moonlit landscape. A large concourse of country people,
368 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT ii
discovered. — The SQUIRE, — FLAM, — the BENSONS, — LUCY,
— ROSE, — MARTIN, and MADDOX.
SQUIRE. Welcome, friends, welcome all ! Come, choose your
partners, and begin the dance.
FLAM (to Lucy). Your hand, for the dance?
LUCY. Pray excuse me, sir; I am not well. My head is op-
pressed and giddy. I would rather sit by the window which
looks into the garden, and feel the cool evening air. (SJie
goes up. He follows her.)
JOHN (aside). Stand by me, Martin. He's gone to order
the chaise, perhaps.
ROSE. Oh ! pray don't let me be taken away, Mr. Stokes.
MARTIN. Don't be frightened,- — don't be frightened. Mr.
Flam is gone. I '11 give the Squire the note in a minute.
SQUIRE. Now, — begin the dance.
A Country Dance.
(MARTIN and MADDOX, in their endeavours to keep close to
ROSE, occasion great confusion. As the SQUIRE is looking
at some particular couple in the- dance, MARTIN steals be-
hind him, thrusts the letter in his hands, and resumes his
place. The SQUIRE looks round as if to discover the per-
son who has delivered it; but being unsuccessful, puts it up,
and retires among the crowd of dancers. Suddenly a vio-
lent scream is heard, and the dance abruptly ceases. Great
confusion. MARTIN and MADDOX hold ROSE firmly.)
SQUIRE. What has happened? Whence did that scream pro-
ceed ?
SEVERAL VOICES. From the garden ! — from the garden !
EDMUNDS (without). Raise him, and bring him here. Lucy,
— dear Lucy !
BENSON. Lucy! My child! (Runs up the stage, and exit
into garden.)
MARTIN. His child ! Damme ! they can't get this one, so
they 're going to run away with the other. Here 's some
mistake here. Let me go, Rose. Come along, John.
Make way there, — make way !
(As they run towards the window, EDMUNDS appears at it,
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 369
sc. v]
without a hat, and his dress disordered, tenth LUCY in hit
arms. He delivers her to her father and ROSE.)
ROSE. Lucy, — dear Lucy, — look up !
BENSON. Is she hurt, George? — is the poor child injured?
EDMUNDS. No, it is nothing but terror ; she will be better in-
stantly. See ! she is recovering now. (Lucy gradually re-
covers, as FLAM, his clothes torn, and face disfigured, is led
in by MADDOX and MARTIN.)
BENSON. Mr. Norton, this is an act of perjury and baseness,
of which another instant would have witnessed the com-
pletion.
SQUIRE (to FLAM). Rascal ! this is your deed.
FLAM (aside to NORTON). That 's right, Norton, keep it up.
SQUIRE. Do not address me with your odious familiarity,
scoundrel !
FLAM. You don't really mean to give me up?
SQUIRE. I renounce you from this instant.
FLAM. You do? — then take the consequences.
SQUIRE. Benson, — Edmunds, — friends, — I declare to you
most solemnly that I had neither hand nor part in this dis-
graceful outrage. It has been perpetrated without my
knowledge, wholly by that scoundrel.
FLAM. 'Tis false; it was done with his consent. He has in
his pocket, at this moment, a letter from me, acquainting
him with my intention.
ALL. A letter !
SQUIRE. A letter was put into my hands five minutes since;
but it acquainted me, not with this fellow's intention, but
with his real dishonourable and disgraceful character, to
which I had hitherto been a stranger. (To FLAM.) Do you
know that handwriting, sir? (Showing him the letter.)
FLAM. Ellis's letter! (searchmg his pockets, and producing
the other). I must, — ass that I wasl — I did — enclose the
wrong one.
SQUIRE. You will quit my house this instant; its roof shall
not shelter you another night. Take that with you, sir,
and begone. ( Throws him a purse. )
FLAM (taking it up). Ah! I suppose you think this munifi-
cent, now — eh? I could have made twice as much of you in
370 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT n
London, Norton, I could indeed, to say nothing of my ex-
hibiting myself for a whole week to these clods of earth,
which would have been cheap, dirt-cheap, at double the
money. Bye-bye, Norton! Farewell, grubs! [Exit.
SQUIRE. Edmunds, you have rescued your future wife from
brutal violence; you will not leave her exposed to similar
attempts in future?
EDMUNDS. Even if I would, I feel, now that I have preserved
her, that I could not.
SQUIRE. Then take her, and with her the old farm, which
from henceforth is your own. You will not turn the old
man out, I suppose?
EDMUNDS (shaking BENSON by the hand). I don't think we
are very likely to quarrel on that score ; and most grate-
fully do we acknowledge your honour's kindness. Mad-
dox!
JOHN. Hallo!
EDMUNDS. I shall not want that cottage and garden we were
speaking of, this morning, now. Let me imitate a good ex-
ample, and bestow it on your wife, as her marriage portion.
ROSE. Oh, delightful! Say certainly, John, — can't you?
JOHN. Thank 'ee, George, thank 'ee! I say, Martin, I have
arrived at the dignity of a cottage and a piece of ground,
at last.
MARTIN. Yes, you may henceforth consider yourself on a
level with me.
SQUIRE, Resume the dance.
MARTIN. I beg your pardon. One word. (Whispers the
SQUIRE.)
SQUIRE. I hope not. Recollect, you have been mistaken be-
fore, to-day. You had better inquire.
MARTIN. I will. (To the audience.) My very particular
friend, if he will allow me to call him so, —
SQUIRE. Oh, certainly.
MARTIN. My very particular friend, Mr. Norton, wishes me
to ask my other particular friends here, whether there 's —
anything wrong? We are delighted to hear your approv-
ing opinion in the old way. You can't do better. It 's
a capital custom.
THE VILLAGE COQUETTES 371
•c. v]
Dance and Finale. — Chorus.
Join the dance, with step as light
As every heart should be to-night;
Music, shake the lofty dome,
In honour of our Harvest Home.
Join the dance, and banish care,
All are young, and gay, and fair;
Even age has youthful grown,
In honour of our Harvest Home.
Join the dance, bright faces beam,
Sweet lips smile, and dark eyes gleam;
All these charms have hither come,
In honour of our Harvest Home.
Join the dance, with step as light,
As every heart should be to-night;
Music, shake the lofty dome,
In honour of our Harvest Home.
Quintet.
LUCY — ROSE — EDMUNDS — The SQUIRE — YOUNG BENSON.
No light bound
Of stag or timid hare,
O'er the ground
Where startled herds repair,
Do we prize
So high, or hold so dear,
As the eyes
That light our pleasures here.
No cool breeze
That gently plays by night,
O'er calm seas,
Whose waters glisten bright;
No soft moan
That sighs across the lea,
Harvest Home,
Is half so sweet as thee!
372 THE VILLAGE COQUETTES
[ACT n
Chorum.
Hail to the merry autumn days, when yellow cornfields shine,
Far brighter than the costly cup that holds the monarch's
wine!
Hail to the merry harvest time, the gayest of the year,
The time of rich and bounteous crops, rejoicing, and good
cheer.
Hail! Hail! Hail!
IS SHE HIS WIFE?
OR, SOMETHING SINGULAR!
A COMIC BURLETTA
IN ONE ACT
[1837]
DRAMATIS PERSONS
AT ST. JAMES'S THEATRE, MARCH 6, 1837-
ALFRED LOVETOWN, ESQ. , . . MR. FORESTER.
MR. PETER LIMBURY . ' .' : . . MR. GARDNER.
FELIX TAPKINS, ESQ. (formerly of the India
House, Leadenhall Street, and Pros-
pect Place, Poplar; but now of the Rus-
tic Lodge, near Reading) . . MR. HARLEY.
JOHN (servant to Lovetown).
MRS. LOVETOWN . . • ] • • Miss ALLISON.
MRS. PETER LIMBURY . MADAME SALA.
IS SHE HIS WIFE?
OR, SOMETHING SINGULAR!
SCENE I. — A Room opening mto a Garden. A Table laid
for Breakfast; Chairs, etc. MR. and MRS. LOVETOWN,
c., discovered at Breakfast, R. H. The former in a dress-
ing-gown and slippers, reading a newspaper. A Screen
on one side.
LOVETOWN (L. H. of table, yawning). Another cup of tea,
my dear, — 0 Lord!
MRS. LOVETOWN (R. H. of table). I wish, Alfred, you would
endeavour to assume a more cheerful appearance in your
wife's society. If you are perpetually yawning and com-
plaining of ennui a few months after marriage, what am I
to suppose you '11 become in a few years? It really is very
odd of you.
LOVETOWN. Not at all odd, my dear, not the least in the
world; it would be a great deal more odd if I were not.
The fact is, my love, I 'm tired of the country ; green fields,
and blooming hedges, and feathered songsters, are fine
things to talk about and read about and write about ; but I
candidly confess that I prefer paved streets, area railings
and dustman's bells, after all.
MRS. LOVETOWN. How often have you told me that, blessed
with my love, you could live contented and happy in a
desert ?
LOVETOWN (reading). 'Artful impostor!'
MRS. LOVETOWN. Have you not over and over again said that
fortune and personal attractions were secondary consid-
erations with you? That you loved me for those virtues
which, while they gave additional lustre to public life,
would adorn and sweeten retirement?
LOVETOWN (reading). 'Soothing syrup !'
MRS. LOVETOWN. You complain of the tedious sameness of a
375
376 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. i
country life. Was it not you yourself who first proposed
our residing permanently in the country? Did you not
say that I should then have an ample sphere in which to
exercise those charitable feelings which I have so often
evinced, by selling at those benevolent fancy fairs?
LOVETOWN (reading). *Humane man-traps!'
MRS. LOVETOWN. He pays no attention to me, — Alfred
dear, —
LOVETOWN (stamping his foot). Yes, my life.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Have you heard what I have just been
saying, dear?
LOVETOWN. Yes, love.
MRS. LOVETOWN. And what can you say in reply?
LOVETOWN. Why, really, my dear, you 've said it so often
before in the course of the last six weeks, that I think it
quite unnecessary to say anything more about it.
(Reads.) 'The learned judge delivered a brief but impres-
sive summary of the unhappy man's trial.'
MRS. LOVETOWN (aside). I could bear anything but this
neglect. He evidently does not care for me.
LOVETOWN (aside). I could put up with anything rather
than these constant altercations and little petty quarrels.
I repeat, my dear, that I am very dull in this out-of-the-
way villa — confoundedly dull, horridly dull.
MRS. LOVETOWN. And I repeat that if you took any pleasure
in your wife's society, or felt for her as you once professed
to feel, you would have no cause to make such a complaint.
LOVETOWN. If I did not know you to be one of the sweetest
creatures in existence, my dear, I should be strongly dis-
posed to say that you were a very close imitation of an
aggravating female.
MRS. LOVETOWN. That 's very curious, my dear, for I declare
that if I hadn't known you to be such an exquisite, good-
tempered, attentive husband, I should have mistaken you
for a very great brute.
LOVETOWN. My dear, you 're offensive.
MRS. LOVETOWN. My love, you're intolerable. (They turn
their chairs back to back.)
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 377
SC. l]
MR. FELDC TAPKINS sings without.
'The wife around her husband throws
Her arms to make him stay ;
"My dear, it rains, it hails, it blows,
And you cannot hunt to-day."
But a hunting we will go,
And a hunting we will go, — wo — wo — wo!
And a hunting we will go.'
MRS. LOVETOWN. There's that dear, good-natured creature,
Mr. Tapkins, — do you ever hear him complain of the
tediousness of a country life? Light-hearted creature, —
his lively disposition and rich flow of spirits are wonderful,
even to me. (Rising.)
LOVETOWN. They need not be a matter of astonishment to
anybody, my dear, — he 's a bachelor.
MR. FELIX TAPKINS appears at window, L. H.
TAPKINS. Ha, ha! How are you both? — Here 's a morning!
Bless my heart alive, what a morning! I've been garden-
ing ever since five o'clock, and the flowers have been
actually growing before my very eyes. The London Pride
is sweeping everything before it, and the stalks are half
as high again as they were yesterday. They 're all run
up like so many tailors' bills, after that heavy dew of last
night broke down half my rosebuds with the weight of its
own moisture, — something like a dew that! — regular doo,
eh ? — come, that 's not so bad for a before-dinner one.
LOVETOWN. Ah, you happy dog, Felix !
TAPKINS. Happy ! of course I am, — Felix by name, Felix by
nature* — what the deuce should I be unhappy for, or any-
body be unhappy for? What's the use of it, that's the
point ?
MRS. LOVETOWN. Have you finished your improvements yet,
Mr. Tapkins?
TAPKINS. At Rustic Lodge? (She nods assent.) Bless
your heart and soul! you never saw such a place, — card-
board chimneys, Grecian balconies, — Gothic parapets,
thatched roof.
378 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. i
MRS. LOVETOWN. Indeed!
TAPKINS. Lord bless you, yes, — green verandah, with ivy
twining round the pillars.
MRS. LOVETOWN. How very rural!
TAPKINS. Rural, my dear Mrs. Lovetown! delightful! The
French windows, too! Such an improvement!
MRS. LOVETOWN. I should think they were!
TAPKINS. Yes, 7 should think they were. Why, on a fine
summer's evening the frogs hop off the grass-plot into the
1 very sitting-room.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Dear me!
TAPKINS. Bless you, yes! Something like the country, — •
quite a little Eden. Why, when I 'm smoking under the
verandah, after a shower of rain, the black beetles fall into
my brandy-and-water.
MR. and MRS. LOVETOWN. No! — Ha! ha! ha!
TAPKINS. Yes. And I take 'em out again with the teaspoon,
and lay bets with myself which of them will run away the
quickest. Ha! ha! ha! (They all laugh.) Then the
stable, too. Why, in Rustic Lodge the stables are close
to the dining-room window.
LOVETOWN. No !
TAPKINS. Yes. The horse can't cough but I hear him.
There 's compactness. Nothing like the cottage style of
architecture for comfort, my boy. By the bye, I have left
the new horse at your garden-gate this moment.
MRS. LOVETOWN. The new horse!
TAPKINS. The new horse! Splendid fellow, — such action!
Puts out its feet like a rocking-horse, and carries its tail
like a hat-peg. Come and see him.
LOVETOWN (laughing"). I can't deny you anything.
TAPKINS. No, that 's what they all say, especially the — eh !
(Nodding and winking.)
LOVETOWN. Ha ! ha ! ha !
MRS. LOVETOWN. Ha ! ha ! ha ! I 'm afraid you 're a very
bad man, Mr. Tapkins ; I 'm afraid you 're a shocking man,
Mr. Tapkins.
TAPKINS. Think so? No, I don't know, — not worse than
other people similarly situated. Bachelors, my dear Mrs.
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 379
SC. l]
Lovetown, bachelors — eh ! old fellow? ( Winking to LOVE-
TOWN.)
LOVETOWN. Certainly, certainly.
TAPKINS. We know— eh? (They all laugh.) By the bye,
talking of bachelors puts me in mind of Rustic Lodge, and
talking of Rustic Lodge puts me in mind of what I came
here for. You must come and see me this afternoon. Lit-
tle Peter Limbury and his wife are coming.
MRS. LOVETOWN. I detest that man.
LOVETOWN. The wife is supportable, my dear.
TAPKINS. To be sure, so she is. You'll come, and that's
enough. Now come and see the horse.
LOVETOWN. Give me three minutes to put on my coat and
boots, and I '11 join you. I won't be three minutes.
[Exit LOVETOWN, R. H.
TAPKINS. Look sharp, look sharp ! — Mrs. Lovetown, will you
excuse me one moment? (Crosses to i.. ; calling off.)
Jim, — these fellows never know how to manage horses, —
walk him gently up and down, — throw the stirrups over
the saddle to show the people that his master 's coming, and
if anybody asks what that fine animal's pedigree is, and
who he belongs to, say he 's the property of Mr. Felix
Tapkins of Rustic Lodge, near Reading, and that he 's the
celebrated horse who ought to have won the Newmarket
Cup last year, only he didn't. [Exit TAPKINS.
MRS. LOVETOWN. My mind is made up, — I can bear Alfred's
coldness and insensibility no longer, and come what may
I will endeavour to remove it. From the knowledge I have
of his disposition I am convinced that the only mode of doing
so will be by rousing his jealousy and wounding his vanity.
This thoughtless creature will be a very good instrument
for my scheme. He plumes himself on his gallantry, has
no very small share of vanity, and is easily led. I see him
crossing the garden. (She brings a chair hastily forward
and sits R. H.)
Enter FELIX TAPKINS, L. H. window.
TAPKINS (singing). 'My dear, it rains, it hails, it blows, — '
MR. LOVETOWN (tragically). Would that I had never be-
held him!
380 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. i
TAPKINS (aside). Hallo! She's talking about her husband.
I knew by their manner there had been a quarrel, when I
came in this morning.
MBS. LOVETOWN. So fascinating, and yet so insensible to
the tenderest of passions as not to see how devotedly I love
him.
TAPKINS (aside). I thought so.
MRS. LOVETOWN. That he should still remain unmarried is to
me extraordinary.
TAPKINS. Um!
MRS. LOVETOWN. He ought to have married long since.
TAPKINS (aside). Eh! Why, they aren't married! — 'ought
to have married long since.' — I rather think he ought.
MRS. LOVETOWN. And, though I am the wife of another, —
TAPKINS (aside). Wife of another!
MRS. LOVETOWN. Still, I grieve to say that I cannot be blind
to his extraordinary merits.
TAPKINS. Why, he 's run away with somebody else's wife !
The villain ! — I must let her know I 'm in the room, or
there 's no telling what I may hear next. ( Coughs. )
MRS. LOVETOWN (starting- up in affected confusion). Mr.
Tapkins ! ( They sit. ) Bring your chair nearer. I fear,
Mr. Tapkins, that I have been unconsciously giving utter-
ance to what was passing in my mind. I trust you have
not overheard my confession of the weakness of my heart.
TAPKINS. No — no — not more than a word or two.
MRS. LOVETOWN. That agitated manner convinces me that
you have heard more than you are willing to confess.
Then why — why should I seek to conceal from you — that
though I esteem my husband, I — I — love — another?
TAPKINS. I heard you mention that little circumstance.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Oh! (Sighs.)
TAPKINS (aside). What the deuce is she Oh-ing at? She
looks at me as if I were Lovetown himself.
MRS. LOVETOWN (putting her hand on his shoulder with a
languishing air). Does my selection meet with your ap-
probation ?
TAPKINS (slowly). It doesn't.
MRS. LOVETOWN- No-'
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 381
BC. l]
TAPKINS. Decidedly not. (Aside.} I'll cut that Love-
town out, and offer myself. Hem! Mrs. Lovetown.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Yes, Mr. Tapkins.
TAPKINS. I know an individual —
MRS. LOVETOWN. Ah! an individual!
TAPKINS. An individual, — I may, perhaps, venture to say
an estimable individual, — who for the last three months
has been constantly in your society, who never yet had
courage to disclose his passion, but who burns to throw him-
self at your feet. Oh! (Aside.) I'll try an Oh or
two now, — Oh! (Sighs.) That's a capital Oh!
MRS. LOVETOWN (aside). He must have misunderstood me
before, for he is evidently speaking of himself. Is the
gentleman you speak of handsome, Mr. Tapkins?
TAPKINS. He is generally considered remarkably so.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Is he tall?
TAPKINS. About the height of the Apollo Belvidere.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Is he stout?
TAPKINS. Of nearly the same dimensions as the gentleman
I have just named.
MRS. LOVETOWN. His figure is —
TAPKINS. Quite a model.
MRS. LOVETOWN. And he is —
TAPKINS. Myself. (Throws himself on his knees and
seizes her hand.)
Enter LOVETOWN, R. H.
TAPKINS immediately pretends to be diligently looking
for something on the floor.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Pray don't trouble yourself. I '11 find it.
Dear me! how could I lose it?
LOVETOWN. What have you lost, love? I should almost
imagine that you had lost yourself, and that our friend
Mr. Tapkins here had just found you.
TAPKINS (aside). Ah! you always will have your joke,—
funny dog! funny dog! Bless your heart and soul,
there's that immortal horse standing outside all this time!
He'll catch his death of cold! Come and see him at
once, — come — come.
382 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. i
LOVETOWN. No. I can't see him to-day. I had forgotten.
I 've letters to write, — business to transact, — I 'm en-
TAPKINS (to MRS. LOVETOWN). Oh! if he's engaged, you
know, we 'd better not interrupt him.
MRS. LOVETOWN. Oh! certainly! Not by any means.
TAPKINS (taking her arm). Good-bye, old fellow.
LOVETOWN (seating himself at table). Oh! — good-bye.
TAPKINS (going). Take care of yourself. I '11 take care
of Mrs. L.
[Exeunt TAPKINS and MRS. LOVETOWN, c.
LOVETOWN. What the deuce does that fellow mean by lay-
ing such emphasis on Mrs. L. ? What 's my wife to him,
or he to my wife ? Very extraordinary ! I can hardly
believe that even if he had the treachery to make any
advances, she would encourage such a preposterous in-
trigue. (Walks to and fro.) She spoke in his praise
at breakfast-time, though, — and they have gone away to-
gether to see that confounded horse. But stop, I must
keep a sharp eye upon them this afternoon, without ap-
pearing to do so. I would not appear unnecessarily sus-
picious for the world. Dissembling in such a case, though,
is difficult — very difficult.
Enter a Servant, L. H.
SERVANT. Mr. and Mrs. Peter Limbury.
LOVETOWN. Desire them to walk in. [Exit Servant, L. H.
A lucky visit ! it furnishes me with a hint. This Mrs. Lim-
bury is a vain, conceited woman, ready to receive the atten-
tions of anybody who feigns admiration for her, partly to
gratify herself, and partly to annoy the jealous little hus-
band whom she keeps under such strict control. If I pay
particular attention to her, I shall lull my wife and that
scoundrel Tapkins into a false security, and have better
opportunities of observation. They are here.
Enter MR. and MRS. LIMBURY, L. H.
LOVETOWN. My dear Mrs. Limbury. (Crosses to c.)
LIMBURY. Eh?
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 383
ec. i]
LOVETOWN (not regarding him). How charming — how de-
lightful— how divine you look to-day.
LIMBURY (aside). Dear Mrs. Limbury, — charming, — divine
and beautiful look to-day! They are smiling at each
other, — he squeezes her hand. I see how it is. I always
thought he paid her too much attention.
LOVETOWN. Sit down, — sit down.
(LOVETOWN places the chairs so as to sit between them, which
LIMBURY in vain endeavours to prevent.)
MRS. LIMBURY. Peter and I called as we passed in our little
pony-chaise, to inquire whether we should have the pleasure
of seeing you at Tapkins's this afternoon.
LOVETOWN. Is it possible you can ask such a question? Do
you think I could stay away?
MRS. LIMBURY. Dear Mr. Lovetown! (Aside.) How po-
lite,— he 's quite struck with me.
LIMBURY (aside). Wretched miscreant! a regular assignation
before my very face.
LOVETOWN (to MRS. LIMBURY). Do you know I entertained
some apprehensions — some dreadful fears — that you might
not be there.
LIMBURY. Fears that we mightn't be there? Of course we
shall be there.
MRS. LIMBURY. Now don't talk, Peter.
LOVETOWN. I thought it just possible, you know, that you
might not be agreeable —
MRS. LIMBURY. O, Peter is always agreeable to anything
that is agreeable to me. Aren't you, Peter?
LIMBURY. Yes, dearest. (Aside.) Agreeable to anything
that 's agreeable to her ! O Lor' !
MRS. LIMBURY. By the bye, Mr. Lovetown, how do you like
this bonnet?
LOVETOWN. O, beautiful!
LIMBURY (aside). I must change the subject. Do you know,
Mr. Lovetown, I have often thought, and it has frequently
occurred to me — when —
MRS. LIMBURY. Now don't talk, Peter. (To LOVETOWN.)
The colour is so bright, is it not?
384 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[9C. n
LOVETOWN. It might appear so elsewhere, but the brightness
of those eyes casts it quite into shade.
MBS. LIMBURY. I know you are a connoisseur in ladies'
dresses ; how do you like those shoes ?
LIMBURY (aside). Her shoes! What will she ask his opinion
of next?
LOVETOWN. O, like the bonnet, you deprive them of their fair
chance of admiration. That small and elegant foot en-
grosses all the attention which the shoes might otherwise
attract. That taper ankle, too —
LIMBURY (aside). Her taper ankle! My bosom swells with
the rage of an ogre. Mr. Lovetown, — I —
MRS. LIMBURY. Now, pray do not talk so, Limbury. You 've
put Mr. Lovetown out as it is.
LIMBURY (aside). Put him out! I wish I could put him out,
Mrs. Limbury. I must.
Enter Servant, hastily.
SERVANT. I beg your pardon, sir, but the bay pony has got
his hind leg over the traces, and he 's kicking the chaise to
pieces !
LIMBURY. Kicking the new chaise to pieces!
LOVETOWN. Kicking the new chaise to pieces! The bay
pony! Limbury, my dear fellow, fly to the spot! (Push-
ing him out.)
LIMBURY. But, Mr. Lovetown, I —
MRS. LIMBURY. Oh ! he '11 kick somebody's brains out, if
Peter don't go to him.
LIMBURY. But perhaps he '11 kick my brains out if I do go
to him.
LOVETOWN. Never mind, don't lose an instant, — not a moment.
(Pushes him out, both talking together.)
[Exit LIMBURY.
(Aside.) Now for it, — here's my wife. Dearest Mrs.
Limbury — (Kneels by her chair, and seizes her hand.)
Enter MRS. LOVETOWN, c.
MRS. LOVETOWN (aside)- Can I believe my eyes? (Retiret
behind the screen.)
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 385
8C. l]
MRS. LIMRURY. Mr. Lovetown!
LOVETOWN. Nay. Allow me in one hurried interview, which
I have sought in vain for weeks, — for months, — to say
how devotedly, how ardently I love you. Suffer me to
retain this hand in mine. Give me one ray of hope.
MRS. LIMBURT. Rise, I entreat you, — we shall be discovered.
LOVETOWN. Nay, I will not rise till you promise me that you
will take an opportunity of detaching yourself from the
rest of the company and meeting me alone in Tapkins's
grounds this evening. I shall have no eyes, no ears for
any one but yourself.
MRS. LIMBURY. Well, — well, — I will — I do —
LOVETOWN. Then I am blest indeed!
MRS. LIMBURY. I am so agitated. If Peter or Mrs. Love-
town — were to find me thus — I should betray all. I '11
teach my husband to be jealous! (Crosses to i» H.) Let
us walk round the garden.
LOVETOWN. With pleasure, — take my arm. Divine creature !
(Aside.) I'm sure she is behind the screen. I saw her
peeping. Come.
[Exit LOVETOWN and MRS. LIMBURY, L. H.
MRS. LOVETOWN (coming forward). Faithless man! His
coldness and neglect are now too well explained. O Al-
fred ! Alfred ! how little did I think when I married you,
six short months since, that I should be exposed to so much
wretchedness! I begin to tremble at my own imprudence,
and the situation in which it may place me; but it is now
too late to recede. I must be firm. This day will either
bring my project to the explanation I so much desire, or
convince me of what I too much fear, — my husband's
aversion. Can this woman's husband suspect their inti-
macy? If so, he may be able to prevent this assignation
taking place. I will seek him instantly. If I can but meet
him at once, he may prevent her going at all.
[Exit MRS. LOVETOWN, R. H.
Enter TAPKINS, L. H. window.
TAPKINS. This, certainly, is a most extraordinary affair.
Not her partiality for me — that's natural enough, — but
386 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. i
the confession I overheard about her marriage to another.
I have been thinking that, after such a discovery, it would
be highly improper to allow Limbury and his wife to meet
her without warning him of the fact. The best way will
be to make him acquainted with the real state of the case.
Then he must see the propriety of not bringing his wife
to my house to-night. Ah ! here he is. I '11 make the
awful disclosure at once, and petrify him.
Enter LIMBURY, L. H. window.
LIMBURY. That damned little bay pony is as bad as my wife.
There 's no curbing either of them ; and as soon as I have
got the traces of the one all right, I lose all traces of the
other.
TAPKINS (R.)- Peter!
LIMBURY (L.)- Ah! Tapkins!
TAPKINS. Hush! Hush! (Looking cautiously round.) If
you have a moment to spare, I 've got something of great
importance to communicate.
LIMBURY. Something of great importance, Mr. Tapkins !
(Aside.) What can he mean? Can it relate to Mrs.
Limbury? The thought is dreadful. You horrify me!
TAPKINS. You '11 be more horrified presently. What I am
about to tell you concerns yourself and your honour very
materially; and I beg you to understand that I communi-
cate it — in the strictest confidence.
LIMBURY. Myself and my honour ! I shall dissolve into noth-
ing with horrible anticipations !
TAPKINS (in a low tone). Have you ever observed anything re-
markable about Lovetown's manner?
LIMBURY. Anything remarkable?
TAPKINS. Ay, — anything very odd, and rather unpleasant?
LIMBURY. Decidedly ! No longer than half an hour ago, —
in this very room, I observed something in his manner par-
ticularly odd and exceedingly unpleasant.
TAPKINS. To your feelings as a husband?
LIMBURY. Yes, my friend, yes, yes ; — you know it all, I see !
TAPKINS. What! Do you know it?
LIMBURY. I 'm afraid I do ; but go on — go on.
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 887
3C. l]
TAPKINS (aside). How the deuce can he know anything about
it? Well, this oddness arises from the peculiar nature of
his connexion with — You look very pale.
LIMBURY. No, no, — go on, — 'connexion with — '
TAPKINS. A certain lady, — you know whom I mean.
LIMBUIIY. I do, I do! (Aside.) Disgrace and confusion!
I '11 kill her with a look ! I '11 wither her with scornful
indignation! Mrs. Limbury! — viper!
TAPKINS (whispering with caution). They — aren't — married
LIMBURY. They aren't married! Who aren't?
TAPKINS. Those two, to be sure !
LIMBURY. Those two \ What two?
TAPKINS. Why, them. And the worst of it is she 's — she 's
married to somebody else.
LIMBURY. Well, of course I know that.
TAPKINS. You know it?
LIMBURY. Of course I do. Why, how you talk! Isn't she
my wife?
TAPKINS. Your wife! Wretched bigamist! Mrs. Lovetown
your wife?
LIMBURY. Mrs. Lovetown ! What ! Have you been talking
of Mrs. Lovetown all this time? My dear friend! {Em-
braces him.) The revulsion of feeling is almost insup-
portable. I thought you were talking about Mrs. Lim-
bury.
TAPKINS. No!
LIMBURY. Yes. Ha! ha! But I say, what a dreadful fellow
this is — another man's wife! Gad, I think he wants to
run away with every man's wife he sees. And Mrs. Love-
town, too — horrid !
TAPKINS. Shocking!
LIMBURY. I say, I oughtn't to allow Mrs. Limbury to asso-
ciate with her, ought I?
TAPKINS. Precisely my idea. You had better induce your
wife to stay away from my house to-night.
LIMBURY. I 'm afraid I can't do that.
TAPKINS. What, has she any particular objection to staying
away ?
LIMBURY. She has a very strange inclination to go, and 'tis
388 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[K. ii
much the same ; however, I '11 make the best arrangement
I can!
TAPKINS. Well, so be it. Of course I shall see you?
LIMBUEY. Of course.
TAPKINS. Mind the secret, — close — close — you know, as a
Cabinet Minister answering a question.
LIMBUBY. You may rely upon me.
[EaAt LIMBURY, L. H., TAPKINS, H. H.
SCENE II. — A Conservatory on one side. A Summer-house
on the other.
Enter LOVETOWN at L. H.
LOVETOWN. So far so good. My wife has not dropped thft
slightest hint of having overheard the conversation between
me and Mrs. Limbury ; but she cannot conceal the impres-
sion it has made upon her mind, or the jealousy it has evi-
dently excited in her breast. This is just as I wished. I
made Mr. Peter Limbury's amiable helpmate promise to
meet me here. I know that refuge for destitute reptiles
(pointing to summer-house) is Tapkins's favorite haunt,
and if he has any assignation with my wife I have no
doubt he will lead her to this place. A woman 's coming
down the walk. Mrs. Limbury, I suppose, — no, my wife,
by all that 's actionable. I must conceal myself here, even
at the risk of a shower of black beetles, or a marching
regiment of frogs. (Goes into conservatory, L. H.)
Enter MRS. LOVETOWN from top, L. H.
MRS. LOVETOWN. I cannot have been mistaken. I am cer-
tain I saw Alfred here; he must have secreted himself
somewhere to avoid me. Can his assignation with Mrs.
Limbury have been discovered? Mr. Limbury's behaviour
to me just now was strange in the extreme; and after a
variety of incoherent expressions he begged me to meet
him here, on a subject, as he said, of great delicacy and
importance to myself. Alas ! I fear that my husband's
neglect and unkindness are but too well known. The in-
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 889
SO. II ]
jured little man approaches. I summon all my fortitude
to bear the disclosure.
Enter Ma. LIMBURY at top, L. H.
LIMB CRY (aside). Now as I could not prevail on Mrs. Lim-
bury to stay away, the only distressing alternative I have
is to inform Mrs. Lovetown that I know her history, and
to put it to her good feeling whether she hadn't better go.
LOVETOWN (peeping). Limbury! what the deuce can that
little wretch want here?
LIMBURY. I took the liberty, Mrs. Lovetown, of begging
you to meet me in this retired spot, because the esteem I
still entertain for you, and my regard for your feelings,
induce me to prefer a private to a public disclosure.
LOVETOWN (peeping-). 'Pubic disclosure!' what on earth is
he talking about ? I wish he 'd speak a little louder.
MRS. LOVETOWN. I am sensible of your kindness, Mr. Lim-
bury, and believe me most grateful for it. I am fully
prepared to hear what you have to say.
LIMBURY. It is hardly necessary for me, I presume, to say,
Mrs. Lovetown, that I have accidentally discovered the
whole secret.
MRS. LOVETOWN. The whole secret, sir?
LOVETOWN (peeping). Whole secret! What secret?
LIMBURY. The whole secret, ma'am, of this disgraceful — I
must call it disgraceful — and most abominable intrigue.
MRS. LOVETOWN (aside). My worst fears are realised, — my
husband's neglect is occasioned by his love for another.
LOVETOWN (peeping). Abominable intrigue! My first sus-
picions are too well founded. He reproaches my wife with
her infidelity, and she cannot deny it, — that villain Tap-
kins !
MRS. LOVETOWN (-weeping). Cruel — cruel — Alfred!
LIMBURY. You may well call him cruel, unfortunate woman.
His usage of you is indefensible, unmanly, scandalous.
MRS. LOVETOWN. It is. It is, indeed.
LIMBURY. It 's very painful for me to express myself in such
plain terms, Mrs. Lovetown ; but allow me to say, as deli-
cately as possible, that you should not endeavour to appear
390 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. ii
in society under such unusual and distressing circumstances.
MBS. LOVETOWN. Not appear in society! Why should I
quit it?
LOVETOWN (peeping). Shameful woman!
LIMBURY. Is it possible you can ask such a question?
MRS. LOVETOWN. What should I do? Where can I go?
LIMBURY. Gain permission to return once again to your hus-
band's roof.
MRS. LOVETOWN. My husband's roof?
LIMBURY. Yes, the roof of your husband, your wretched,
unfortunate husband!
MRS. LOVETOWN. Never!
LIMBURY (aside). She 's thoroughly hardened, steeped in vice
beyond redemption. Mrs. Lovetown, as you reject my
well-intentioned advice in this extraordinary manner, I am
reduced to the painful necessity of expressing my hope
that you will, — now pray don't think me unkind, — that
you will never attempt to meet Mrs. Limbury more.
MRS. LOVETOWN. WThat! Can you suppose I am so utterly
dead to every sense of feeling and propriety as to meet
that person, — the destroyer of my peace and happiness, —
the wretch who has ruined my hopes and blighted my pros-
pects for ever? Ask your own heart, sir, — appeal to your
own feelings. You are naturally indignant at her con-
duct. You would hold no further communication with
her. Can you suppose, then, / would deign to do so?
The mere supposition is an insult!
[Exit MRS. LOVETOWN hastily at top, L. H.
LIMBURY. What can all this mean? I am lost in a maze of
astonishment, petrified at the boldness with which she
braves it out. Eh ! it 's breaking upon me by degrees. I
see it. What did she say? 'Destroyer of peace and hap-
piness,— person — ruined hopes and blighted prospects —
her/ I see it all. That atrocious Lovetown, that Don
Juan multiplied by twenty, that unprecedented libertine,
has seduced Mrs. Limbury from her allegiance to her lawful
lord and master. He first of all runs away with the wife
of another man, and he is no sooner tired of her, than he
runs away with another wife of another man. I thirst for
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 391
SC. II ]
his destruction. I — (LOVETOWN rushes from the con-
servatory and embraces LIMBUEY, who disengages himself.)
Murderer of domestic happiness ! behold your victim !
LOVETOWN. Alas! you speak but too truly. (Covering hit
face with his hands.) I am the victim.
LIMBURY. I speak but too truly! — He avows his own crim-
inality. I shall throttle him. I know I shall. I feel it.
Enter MRS. LIMBURY at back, L. H.
MRS. LIMBURY (aside). My husband here! (Goes into con-
servatory. )
Enter TAPKINS at back, L. H.
TAPKINS (a-side). Not here, and her husband with Limbury.
I '11 reconnoitre. (Goes into summer-house, n. H.)
LIMBURY. Lovetown, have you the boldness to look an honest
man in the face?
LOVETOWN. O, spare me! I feel the situation In which I am
placed acutely, deeply. Feel for me when I say that from
that conservatory I overheard the greater part of what
passed between you and Mrs. Lovetown.
LIMBURY. You did?
LOVETOWN. Need I say how highly I approve both of the
language you used, and the advice you gave her?
LIMBURY. What! you want to get rid of her, do you?
LOVETOWN. Can you doubt it?
TAPKINS (peeping). Hallo! he wants to get rid of her.
Queer !
LOVETOWN. Situated as I am, you know, I have no other re-
source, after what has passed. I must part from her.
MRS. LIMBURY (peeping). What can he mean?
LIMBURY (aside). I should certainly throttle him, were it not
that the coolness with which he refers to the dreadful event
paralyses me. Mr. Lovetown, look at me! Sir, consider
the feelings of an indignant husband, sir!
LOVETOWN. Oh, I thank you for those words. Those strong
expressions prove the unaffected interest you take in the
matter.
LIMBURY. Unaffected interest! I shall go raving mad with
392 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. n
passion and fury ! Villain ! Monster ! To embrace the
opportunity afforded him of being on a footing of friend-
ship.
LOVETOWN. To take a mean advantage of his being a single
man.
LIMBURY. To tamper with the sacred engagements of a mar-
ried woman.
LOVETOWN. To place a married man in a disgraceful and
humiliating situation.
LIMBUKY. Scoundrel! Do you mock me to my face?
LOVETOWN. Mock you. What d'ye mean? Who the devil
are you talking about?
LIMBURY. Talking about — you!
LOVETOWN. Mel
LIMBURY. Designing miscreant! Of whom do you speak?
LOVETOWN. Of whom should I speak but that scoundrel Tap-
kins?
TAPKINS {coming forward, R.). Me! What the devil do you
mean by that?
LOVETOWN. Ha! (Rushing at him, is held back by LIMBURY.)
LIMBURY (to TAPKINS). Avoid him. Get out of his sight.
He 's raving mad with conscious villainy.
TAPKINS. What are you all playing at / spy I over my two
acres of infant hay for?
LOVETOWN (to TAPKINS). How dare you tamper with the
affections of Mrs. Lovetown?
TAPKINS. O, is that all? Ha! ha! (Crosses to c.)
LOVETOWN. All!
TAPKINS. Come, come, none of your nonsense.
LOVETOWN. Nonsense! Designate the best feelings of our
nature nonsense!
TAPKINS. Pooh ! pooh ! Here, I know all about it.
LOVETOWN (angrily). And so do I, sir! And so do I.
TAPKINS. Of course you do. And you 've managed very well
to keep it quiet so long. But you 're a deep fellow, by
Jove ! you 're a deep fellow !
LOVETOWN. Now, mind ! I restrain myself sufficiently to ask
you once again before I knock you down, by what right
dare you tamper with the affections of Mrs. Lovetown?
IS SHE HIS WIFE? 393
SC. II ]
TAPKINS. Right ! O, if you come to strict right, you know,
nobody has a right but her husband.
LOVETOWN. And who is her husband? Who is her husband?
TAPKINS. Ah ! to be sure, that 's the question. Nobody that
I know. I hope — poor fellow —
LOVETOWN. I'll bear these insults no longer! (Rushes to-
wards TAPKINS. LIMBUBY interposes. LOVETOWN crosses
to R. H. A scream is heard from the conservatory — a
pause. )
TAPKINS. Something singular among the plants! (He goes
into the conservatory and returns with MRS. LIMBURY.) A
flower that wouldn't come out of its own accord. I was
obliged to force it. Tolerably full blown now, at all events.
LIMBURY. My wife! Traitoress! (Crosses to i.. H.) Fly
from my presence! Quit my sight! Return to the con-
servatory with that demon in a frock-coat !
Enter MRS. LOVETOWN at top, L. H., and comes down c.
TAPKINS. Hallo ! Somebody else !
LOVETOWN (aside}. My wife here!
MRS. LOVETOWN (to LIMBURY). I owe you some return for
the commiseration you expressed just now for my wretched
situation. The best, the only one I can make you is, to
entreat you to refrain from committing any rash act, how-
ever excited you may be, and to control the feelings of an
injured husband.
TAPKINS. Injured husband! Decidedly singular!
LOVETOWN. The allusion of that lady I confess my utter
inability to understand. Mr. Limbury, to you an explana-
tion is due, and I make it more cheerfully, as my abstaining
from doing so might involve the character of your wife.
Stung by the attentions which I found Mrs. Lovetown had
received from a scoundrel present, —
TAPKINS (aside). That 's me.
LOVETOWN. I — partly to obtain opportunities of watching
her closely, under an assumed mask of levity and careless-
ness, and partly in the hope of awaking once again any
dormant feelings of affection that might still slumber in
her breast, affected a passion for your wife which I never
394 IS SHE HIS WIFE?
[sc. ii
felt, and to which she never really responded. The second
part of my project, I regret to say, has failed. The first
has succeeded but too well.
LIMBURY. Can I believe my ears? But how came Mrs. Peter
Limbury to receive those attentions?
MRS. LIMBURY. Why, not because I liked them, of course, but
to assist Mr. Lovetown in his project, and to teach you
the misery of those jealous fears. Come here, you stupid
little jealous, insinuating darling. (They retire up L. H*
she coaxing him.)
TAP KINS (aside). It strikes me very forcibly that I have made
a slight mistake here, which is something particularly sin-
gular. (Turns up R. H.)
MRS. LOVETOWN. Alfred, hear me! I am as innocent as
yourself. Your fancied neglect and coldness hurt my weak
vanity, and roused some foolish feelings of angry pride.
In a moment of irritation I resorted to some such retalia-
tion as you have yourself described. That I did so from
motives as guiltless as your own I call Heaven to witness.
That I repent my fault I solemnly assure you.
LOVETOWN. Is this possible?
TAPKINS. Very possible indeed! Believe your wife's assur-
ance and my corroboration. Here, give and take is all
fair, you know. Give me your hand and take your wife's.
Here, Mr. and Mrs. L. (To LIMBURY.) Double L, — I
call them. (To LOVETOWN.) Small italic and Roman
capital. (To MR. and MRS. LIMBURY, who come forward.)
Here, it 's all arranged. The key to the whole matter is
that I 've been mistaken, which is something singular. If I
have made another mistake in calculating on your kind and
lenient reception of our last half-hour's misunderstanding
(to the audience), I shall have done something more singu-
lar still. Do you forbid me committing any more mis-
takes, or may I announce my intention of doing something
singular again?
THE LAMPLIGHTER
A FARCE
IN ONE ACT
[1838]
DRAMATIS PERSONS
MR. STARGAZER.
MASTER GALILEO ISAAC NEWTON FLAMSTEAD STARGAZHR
(his son).
TOM GRIG (the Lamplighter).
MR. MOONEY (an Astrologer).
SERVANT.
BETSY MARTIN.
EMMA STARGAZER.
FANNY BROWN.
THE LAMPLIGHTER1
SCENE I. — The Street, outside of ME. STARGAZEE'S house.
Two street Lamp-posts in front.
TOM GEIG (with ladder and lantern, singing as he enters).
Day has gone down o'er the Baltic's proud bil-ler;
Evening has sigh'd, alas ! to the lone wil-ler ;
Night hurries on, night hurries on, earth and ocean to
kiv-ver ;
Rise, gentle moon, rise, gentle moon, and guide me to
my —
That ain't a rhyme, that ain't — kiv-ver and lover ! I ain't
much of a poet; but if I couldn't make better verse than
that, I 'd undertake to be set fire to, and put up, instead of
the lamp, before Alderman Waithman's obstacle in Fleet
Street. Bil-ler, wil-ler, kiv-ver — shiver, obviously. That 's
what / call poetry. (Sings.)
Day has gone down o'er the Baltic's proud bil-ler —
(During the previous speech he has been occupied in
lighting one of the lamps. As he is about to light
the other, ME. STAEGAZEE appears at -window, with
a telescope.)
ME. STAEGAZEE (after spying most intently at the clouds).
Holloa !
TOM (on ladder). Sir, to you! And holloa again, if you
come to that.
ME. STAEGAZEE. Have you seen the comet?
TOM. What Comet — The Exeter Comet?
ME. STAEGAZEE. What comet? The comet— Halley's comet!
TOM. Nelson's, you mean. I saw it coming out of the yard,
not five minutes ago.
i Printed from the manuscript in the Forster collection at the South
Kensington Museum.
397
398 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. i
MR. STARGAZER. Could you distinguish anything of a tail?
TOM. Distinguish a tail? I believe you — four tails!
MR. STARGAZER. A comet with four tails; and all visible to
the naked eye ! Nonsense, it couldn't be.
TOM. You wouldn't say that again if you was down here, old
Bantam. (Clock strikes five.) You'll tell me next, I
suppose, that that isn't five o'clock striking, eh?
MR. STARGAZER. Five o'clock — five o'clock! Five o'clock
P.M. on the thirtieth day of November, one thousand eight
hundred and thirty-eight! Stop till I come down — stop!
Don't go away on any account — not a foot, not a step.
(Closes window.)
TOM (descending, and shouldering his ladder). Stop! stop, to
a lamplighter, with three hundred and seventy shops and
a hundred and twenty private houses waiting to be set a
light to! Stop, to a lamplighter!
As he is running off, enter MR. STARGAZER from his
house, hastily.
MR. STARGAZER (detainmg him). Not for your life! — not
for your life! The thirtieth day of November, one thou-
sand eight hundred and thirty-eight! Miraculous circum-
stance! extraordinary fulfilment of a prediction of the
planets !
TOM. What are you talking about?
MR. STARGAZER (looking about). Is there nobody else in
sight, up the street or down? No, not a soul ! This, then,
is the man whose coming was revealed to me by the stars,
six months ago !
TOM. What do you mean?
MR. STARGAZER. Young man, that I have consulted the
Book of Fate with rare and wonderful success, — that com-
ing events have cast their shadows before.
TOM. Don't talk nonsense to me, — I ain't an event ; I 'm a
lamplighter !
MR. STARGAZER (aside). True! — Strange destiny that one,
announced by the planets as of noble birth, should be de-
voted to so humble an occupation. (Aloud.) But you
were not always a lamplighter?
gc THE LAMPLIGHTER 399
TOM. Why, no. I wasn't born with a ladder on my left
shoulder, and a light in my other hand. But I took to it
very early, though,— I had it from my uncle.
MR. STARGAZER (aside). He had it from his uncle! How
plain, and yet how forcible, is his language! He speaks
of lamplighting, as though it were the whooping-cough
or measles! (To him.) Ay!
TOM. Yes, he was the original. You should have known
him ! — 'cod ! he was a genius, if ever there was one. Gas
was the death of him! When gas lamps was first talked
of, my uncle draws himself up, and says, 'I '11 not believe it,
there 's no sich a thing,' he says. 'You might as well talk
of laying on an everlasting succession of glow-worms!'
But when they made the experiment of lighting a piece of
Pall Mall—
MR. STARGAZER. That was when it first came up?
TOM. No, no, that was when it was first laid down. Don't
mind me; I can't help a joke, now and then. My uncle
was sometimes took that way. When the experiment was
made of lighting a piece of Pall Mall, and he had actually
witnessed it, with his own eyes, you should have seen my
uncle then!
MR. STARGAZER. So much overcome?
TOM. Overcome, sir! He fell off his ladder, from weakness,
fourteen times that very night; and his last fall was into
a wheelbarrow that was going his way, and humanely took
him home. 'I foresee in this,' he says, 'the breaking up
of our profession; no more polishing of the tin reflectors,'
he says; 'no more fancy-work, in the way of clipping the
cottons at two o'clock in the morning; no more going the
rounds to trim by daylight, and dribbling down of the \le
on the hats and bonnets of the ladies and gentlemen, when
one feels in good spirits. Any low fellow can light a
gas-lamp, and it 's all up !' So he petitioned the Govern-
ment for — what do you call that that they give to people
when it 's found out that they 've never been of any use,
and have been paid too much for doing nothin?
MR. STARGAZER. Compensation?
TOM. Yes, that 's the thing, — compensation. They didn't
400 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. i
give him any, though ! And then he got very fond of his
country all at once, and went about, saying how that the
bringing in of gas was a death-blow to his native land, and
how that its He and cotton trade was gone for ever, and
the whales would go and kill themselves, privately, in spite
and vexation at not being caught! After this, he was
right-down cracked, and called his 'bacco pipe a gas pipe,
and thought his tears was lamp He, and all manner of non-
sense. At last, he went and hung himself on a lamp iron,
in St. Martin's Lane, that he'd always been very fond of;
and as he was a remarkably good husband, and had never
had any secrets from his wife, he put a note in the two-
penny post, as he went along, to tell the widder where the
body was.
MR. STARGAZER (laying his hand upon his arm, and speaking
mysteriously). Do you remember your parents?
TOM. My mother I do, very well !
MR. STARGAZER. Was she of noble birth ?
TOM. Pretty well. She was in the mangling line. Her
mother came of a highly respectable family, — such a busi-
ness, in the sweetstuff and hardbake way !
MR. STARGAZER. Perhaps your father was —
TOM. Why, I hardly know about him. The fact is, there
was some little doubt, at the time, who was my father.
Two or three young gentlemen were paid the pleasing com-
pliment; but their incomes being limited, they were com-
pelled delicately to decline it.
MR. STARGAZER. Then the prediction is not fulfilled merely
in part, but entirely and completely. Listen, young
man, — I am acquainted with all the celestial bodies —
TOM. Are you, though? — I hope they are quite well, — every
body.
MR. STARGAZER. Don't interrupt me. I am versed in the
great sciences of astronomy and astrology ; in my house
there I have every description of apparatus for observing
the course and motion of the planets. I 'm writing a work
about them, which will consist of eighty-four volumes, im-
perial quarto ; and an appendix; nearly twice as long. I
read what 's going to happen in the stars.
401
SC. l]
TOM. Read what 's going to happen in the stars ! Will any-
thing particular happen in the stars in the course of next
week, now?
MR. STAEGAZEE. You don't understand me. I read in the
stars what 's going to happen here. Six months ago I
derived from this source the knowledge that, precisely as
the clock struck five, on the afternoon of this very day, a
stranger would present himself before my enraptured
sight, — that stranger would be a man of illustrious and
high descent, — that stranger would be the destined husband
of my young and lovely niece, who is now beneath that
roof (points to his house); — that stranger is yourself: I
receive you with open arms !
TOM. Me! I, the man of illustrious and high — I, the hus-
band of a young and lovely — Oh! it can't be, you know!
the stars have made a mistake — the comet has put 'em
out!
MR. STAEGAZEE. Impossible! The characters were as plain
as pike-staves. The clock struck five ; you were here ; there
was not a soul in sight; a mystery envelops your birth;
you are a man of noble aspect. Does not everything com-
bine to prove the accuracy of my observations?
TOM. Upon my word, it looks like it! And now I come to
think of it, I have very often felt as if I wasn't the small
beer I was taken for. And yet I don't know, — you 're
quite sure about the noble aspect?
ME. STARGAZER. Positively certain.
TOM. Give me your hand.
MR. STAEGAZEE. And my heart, too! (They shake hands
heartily. )
TOM. The young lady is tolerably good-looking, is she?
MR. STARGAZER. Beautiful! A graceful carriage, an ex-
quisite shape, a sweet voice; a countenance beaming with
animation and expression ; the eye of a startled fawn.
TOM. I see; a sort of game eye. Does she happen to have
any of the — this is quite between you and me, you know, —
and I only ask from curiosity, — not because I care about
it, — any of the ready?
MR. STARGAZER. Five thousand pounds! But what of that?
402 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. i
what of that? A word in your ear. I 'm in search of
the philosopher's stone! I have very nearly found it —
not quite. It turns everything to gold ; that 's its property.
TOM. What a lot of property it must have!
MR. STARGAZER. When I get it, we '11 keep it in the family.
Not a word to any one! What will money be to us? We
shall never be able to spend it fast enough.
TOM. Well, you know, we can but try, — I '11 do my best en-
deavours.
MR. STARGAZER. Thank you, — thank you ! But I '11 intro-
duce you to your future bride at once: — this way, this
way!
TOM. What, without going my rounds first?
STARGAZER. Certainly. A man in whom the planets take
especial interest, and who is about to have a share in the
philosopher's stone, descend to lamplighting !
TOM. Perish the base idea ! not by no means ! I '11 take in
my tools, though, to prevent any kind inquiries after me,
at your door. (As he shoulders the ladder the sound of
violent rain is heard.) Holloa.
MR. STARGAZER (putting his hand on his head in amazement).
What's that?
TOM. It Js coming down, rather.
MR. STARGAZER. Rain!
TOM. Ah ! and a soaker, too !
MR. STARGAZER. It can't be! — it's impossible! — (Taking a
book from his pocket, and turning over the pages hur-
riedly. ) Look here, — here it is, — here 's the weather al-
manack,— 'Set fair,' — I knew it couldn't be! (with great
triumph).
TOM (turning up his collar as the ram increases). Don't
you think there's a dampness in the atmosphere?
MR. STARGAZER (looking up). It's singular, — it's like rain!
TOM. Uncommonly like.
iMR. STARGAZER. It 's a mistake in the elements, somehow.
Here it is, 'set fair,' — and set fair it ought to be. 'Light
clouds floating about.' Ah ! you see, there are no light
clouds; — the weather's all wrong.
TOM. Don't you think we had better get under cover?
THE LAMPLIGHTER 403
ISC. II j
MR. STARGAZER (slowly retreating towards the house). I
don't acknowledge that it has any right to rain, mind! I
protest against this. If Nature goes on in this way, I
shall lose all respect for her,— it won't do, you know; it
ought to have been two degrees colder, yesterday; and
instead of that, it was warmer. This is not the way to
treat scientific men. I protest against it!
[Exeunt into house, both talking, TOM pushing STAR-
GAZER on, and the latter continually turnmg back, to
declaim against the weather.
SCENE II. — A Room in STARGAZER'S house. BETSY MAR-
TIN, EMMA STARGAZER, FANNY BROWN, and GALILEO,
all murmuring together as they enter.
BETSY. I say, again, young ladies, that it 's shameful ! un-
bearable !
ALL. Oh! shameful! shameful!
BETSY. Marry Miss Emma to a great, old, ugly, doting,
dreaming As-tron-o-Magician, like Mr. Mooney, who 's
always winking and blinking through telescopes and that,
and can't see a pretty face when it 's under his very nose !
GALILEO (with a melancholy air). There never was a pretty
face under his nose, Betsy, leastways, since I 've known
him. He 's very plain.
BETSY. Ah ! there 's poor young master, too ; he hasn't even
spirits enough to laugh at his own jokes. I 'm sure I pity
him, from the very bottom of my heart.
FANNY and EMMA. Poor fellow!
GALILEO. Ain't I a legitimate subject for pity? Ain't it a
dreadful thing that I, that am twenty-one come next Lady-
day, should be treated like a little boy? — and all because
my father is so busy with the moon's age that he don't
care about mine ; and so much occupied in making observa-
tions on the sun round which the earth revolves, that he
takes no notice of the son that revolves round him! I
wasn't taken out of nankeen frocks and trousers till I
became xjuite unpleasant in 'em.
ALL. What a shame!
404 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. ii
GALILEO. I wasn't, indeed. And look at me now ! Here 's
a state of things. Is this a suit of clothes for a major, —
at least, for a gentleman who is a minor now, but will be
a major on the very next Lady-day that comes? Is this
a fit—
ALL (interrupting him). Certainly not!
GALILEO (vehemently). I won't stand it — I won't submit
to it any longer. I will be married.
ALL. No, no, no ! don't be rash.
GALILEO. I will, I tell you. I '11 marry my cousin Fanny.
Give me a kiss, Fanny; and Emma and Betsy will look
the other way the while. (Kisses her.) There!
BETSY. Sir — sir ! here 's your father coming !
GALILEO. Well, then, I '11 have another, as an antidote to my
father. One more; Fanny. (Kisses her.)
MR. STARGAZES, (without). This way! this way! You shall
behold her immediately.
Enter MR. STARGAZER, TOM following bashfully.
MR. STARGAZER. Where is my — ? Oh, here she is ! Fanny,
my dear, come here. Do you see that gentleman?
(Aside.)
FANNY. What gentleman, uncle? Do you mean that elastic
person yonder who is bowing with so much perseverance?
MR. STARGAZER. Hush ! yes ; that 's the interesting stranger.
FANNY. Why, he is kissing his hand, uncle. What does
the creature mean?
MR. STARGAZER. Ah, the rogue! Just like me, before I mar-
ried your poor aunt, — all fire and impatience. He means
love, my darling, love. I 've such a delightful surprise
for you. I didn't tell you before, for fear there should
be any mistake ; but it 's all right, it 's all right. The
stars have settled it all among 'em. He 's to be your hus-
band!
FANNY. My husband, uncle? Goodness gracious, Emma!
(Converses apart with her.)
MR. STARGAZER (aside). He has made a sensation already.
His noble aspect and distinguished air have produced an
instantaneous impression. Mr. Grig, will you permit me?
THE LAMPLIGHTER 405
oC» 11 1
(ToM advances awkwardly.)— This is my niece, Mr. Grig,
—my niece, Miss Fanny Brown; my daughter, Emma,—
Mr. Thomas Grig, the favourite of the planets.
TOM. I hope I see Miss Hemmer in a conwivial state. (Aside
to MR. STARGAZER.) I say, I don't know which Js which.
MR. STARGAZER (aside). The young lady nearest here is your
affianced bride. Say something appropriate.
TOM. Certainly ; yes, of course. Let me see. Miss (crosses
to her)— I— thank 'ee! (Kisses her, behind Us hat. She
screams. )
GALILEO (bursting from BETSY, who has been retaining him).
Outrageous insolence! (Betsy runs off.)
MR. STARGAZER. Halloa, sir, halloa!
TOM. Who is this juvenile salamander, sir?
ME. STARGAZER. My little boy, — only my little boy; don't
mind him. Shake hands with the gentleman, sir, instantly
(to GALILEO).
TOM. A very fine boy, indeed ! and he does you great credit,
sir. How d'ye do, my little man? (Tliey shake hands,
GALILEO looking very wrathful, as TOM pats him on tJie
head. ) There, that 's very right and proper. ' 'Tis dogs
delight to bark and bite'; not young gentlemen, you
know. There, there!
MR. STARGAZER. Now let me introduce you to that sanctum
sanctorum, — that hallowed ground, — that philosophical
retreat — where I, the genius loci, —
TOM. Eh?
MR. STARGAZER. The genius loci —
TOM (aside). Something to drink, perhaps. Oh, ah! yes,
yes!
MR. STARGAZER. Have made all my greatest and most pro-
found discoveries ! where the telescope has almost grown
to my eye with constant application ; and the glass retort
has been shivered to pieces from the ardour with which
my experiments have been pursued. There the illustrious
Mooney is, even now, pursuing those researches which will
enrich us with precious metal, and make us masters of the
world. -Come, Mr. Grig.
TOM. By all means, sir; and luck to the illustrious Mooney,
406 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. ii
say I, — not so much on Mooney's account as for our noble
selves.
MR. STARGAZER. Emma!
EMMA. Yes, papa.
MR. STARGAZER. The same day that makes your cousin Mrs.
Grig, will make you and that immortal man, of whom we
have just now spoken, one.
EMMA. Oh! consider, dear papa, —
MR. STARGAZER. You are unworthy of him, I know ; but he, —
kind, generous creature, — consents to overlook your de-
fects, and to take you, for my sake, — devoted man! —
Come, Mr. Grig! — Galileo Isaac Newton Flamstead!
GALILEO. Well? (Advancing sulkily.)
MR. STARGAZER. In name, alas ! but not in nature ; knowing,
even by sight, no other planets than the gun and moon, —
here is your weekly pocket-money, — sixpence! Take it
all!
TOM. And don't spend it all at once, my man ! Now, sir !
MR. STARGAZER. Now, Mr. Grig, — go first, sir, I beg!
[Exeunt TOM and MR. STARGAZER.
GALILEO. 'Come, Mr. Grig!' — 'Go first, Mr. Grig!' — 'Day
that makes your cousin Mrs. Grig !' — I '11 secretly stick a
penknife into Mr. Grig, if I live to be three hours older!
FANNY (on one side of him). Oh! don't talk in that desperate
way, — there 's a dear, dear creature !
EMMA (on the other side). No! pray do not; — it makes my
blood run cold to hear you.
GALILEO. Oh ! if I was of age ! — if I was only of age ! — or
we could go to Gretna Green, at threepence a head, includ-
ing refreshments and all incidental expenses. But that
could never be ! Oh ! if I was only of age !
FANNY. But what if you were? What could you do, then?
GALILEO. Marry you, cousin Fanny; I could marry you then
lawfully, and without anybody's consent.
FANNY. You forget that, situated as we are, we could not
be married, even if you were one-and-twenty ; — we have no
money !
EMMA. Not even enough for the fees!
GALILEO. Oh! I am sure every Christian clergyman, under
*t.
THE LAMPLIGHTER 407
such afflicting circumstances, would marry us on credit.
The wedding-fees might stand over till the first christen-
ing, and then we could settle the little bill altogether. Oh !
why ain't I of age! — why ain't I of age?
Enter BETSY, in haste.
BETSY. Well! I never could have believed it! There, Miss!
I wouldn't have believed it, if I had dreamt it, even with a
bit of bride-cake under my pillow! To dare to go and
think of marrying a young lady, with five thousand
pounds, to a common lamplighter !
ALL. A lamplighter?
BETSY. Yes, he's Tom Grig the lamplighter, and nothing
more nor less, and old Mr. Stargazer goes and picks him
out of the open street, and brings him in for Miss Fanny's
husband, because he pretends to have read something about
it in the stars. Stuff and nonsense! I don't believe he
knows his letters in the stars, and that 's the truth ; or if
he 's got as far as words in one syllable, it 's quite as much
as he has.
FANNY. Was such an atrocity ever heard of? I, left with
no power to marry without his consent, and he almost pos-
sessing the power to force my inclinations.
EMMA. It 's actually worse than my being sacrificed to that
odious and detestable Mr. Mooney.
BETSY. Come, Miss, it's not quite so bad as that neither;
for Thomas Grig is a young man, and a proper young
man enough too, but as to Mr. Mooney, — oh, dear! no
husband is bad enough in my opinion, Miss; but he is
worse than nothing, — a great deal worse.
FANNY. You seem to speak feelingly about this same Mr.
Grig.
BETSY. Oh, dear no, Miss, not I. I don't mean to say but
what Mr. Grig may be very well in his way, Miss ; but
Mr. Grig and I have never held any communication to-
gether, not even so much as how-d' ye-do. Oh, no indeed,
I have been very careful, Miss, as I always am with
strangers. I was acquainted with the last lamplighter,
Miss, but he 's going to be married, and has given up the
408 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. H
calling, for the young woman's parents being very respect-
able, wished her to marry a literary man, and so he has set
up as a bill-sticker. Mr. Grig only came upon this beat
at five to-night, Miss.
FANNY. Which is a very sufficient reason why you don't know
more of him.
BETSY. Well, Miss, perhaps it is ; and I hope there 's no crime
in making friends in this world, if we can, Miss.
FANNY. Certainly not. So far from it, that I most heartily
wish you could make something more than a friend of
this Mr. Grig, and so lead him to falsify this prediction.
GALILEO. Oh! don't you think you could, Betsy?
EMMA. You could not manage at the same time to get any
young friend of yours to make something more than a
friend of Mr. Mooney, could you, Betsy?
GALILEO. But, seriously, don't you think you could manage
to give us all a helping hand together, in some way, eh,
Betsy?
FANNY. Yes, yes, that would be so delightful. I should be
grateful to her for ever. Shouldn't you?
EMMA. Oh, to the very end of my life!
GALILEO. And so should I, you know, and lor'! we should
make her so rich, when — when we got rich ourselves, —
shouldn't we?
BOTH. Oh, that we should, of course.
BETSY. Let me see. I don't wish to have Mr. Grig to myself,
you know. I don't want to be married.
ALL. No ! no ! no ! Of course she don't.
BETSY. I haven't the least idea to put Mr. Grig off this
match, you know, for anybody's sake, but you young
people's. I am going quite contrairy to my own feelings,
you know.
ALL. Oh, yes, yes! How kind she is!
BETSY. Well, I '11 go over the matter with the young ladies
in Miss Emma's room, and if we can think of anything
that seems likely to help us, so much the better; and if we
can't, we 're none the worst. But Master Galileo mustn't
come, for he is so horrid jealous of Miss Fanny that I
dursn't hardly say anything before him. Why, I declare
gc THE LAMPLIGHTER 409
(looking of), there is my gentleman looking about him
as if he had lost Mr. Stargazer, and now he turns this way.
^ There — get out of sight. Make haste!
GALILEO. I may see 'em as far as the bottom stair, mayn't I,
Betsy?
BETSY. Yes, but not a step farther on any consideration.
There, get away softly, so that if he passes here, he may
find me alone. (They creep gently out, GALILEO returns
and peeps in.}
GALILEO. Hist, Betsy!
BETSY. Go away, sir. What have you come back for?
GALILEO {holding out a large pin). I wish you 'd take an
opportunity of sticking this a little way into him for pat-
ting me on the head just now.
BETSY. Nonsense, you can't afford to indulge in such ex-
pensive amusements as retaliation yet awhile. You must
wait till you come into your property, sir. There. — Get
you gone! [Exit GALILEO.
Enter TOM GBIG.
TOM (aside}. I never saw such a scientific file in my days.
The enterprising gentleman that drowned himself to see
how it felt, is nothing to him. There he is, just gone
down to the bottom of a dry well in an uncommonly small
bucket, to take an extra squint at the stars, they being
seen best, I suppose, through the medium of a cold in the
head. Halloa ! Here is a young female of attractive
proportions. I wonder now whether a man of noble as-
pect would be justified in tickling her. (He advances
stealthily and tickles her under the arm.)
BETSY (starting}. Eh! what! Lor', sir!
TOM. Don't be alarmed. My intentions are strictly honour-
able. In other words, I have no intentions whatever.
BETSY. Then you ought to be more careful, Mr. Grig. That
was a liberty, sir.
TOM. I know it was. The cause of liberty, all over the
world, — that's my sentiment! What is your name?
BETSY (curtseying). Betsy Martin, sir.
TOM. A name famous both in song and story. Would you
410 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. n
have the goodness, Miss Martin, to direct me to that par-
ticular apartment wherein the illustrious Mooney is now
pursuing his researches?
BETSY (aside). A little wholesome fear may not be amiss.
(To him, in assumed agitation.) You are not going into
that room, Mr. Grig?
TOM. Indeed, I am, and I ought to be there now, having
promised to join that light of science, your master (a
short six, by the bye!), outside the door.
BETSY. That dreadful and mysterious chamber ! Another vic-
tim!
TOM. Victim, Miss Martin!
BETSY. Oh! the awful oath of secrecy which binds me not to
disclose the perils of that gloomy, hideous room.
TOM (astonished). Miss Martin!
BETSY. Such a fine young man, — so rosy and fresh-coloured,
that he should fall into the clutches of that cruel and in-
satiable monster ! I cannot continue to witness such fright-
ful scenes ; I must give warning.
TOM. If you have anything to unfold, young woman, have
the goodness to give me warning at once.
BETSY (affecting to recover herself). No, no, Mr. Grig, it's
nothing, — it 's ha ! ha ! ha ! — don't mind me, don't mind
me, but it certainly is very shocking; — no, — no, — I don't
mean that. I mean funny, — yes. Ha! ha! ha!
TOM (aside, regarding her attentively). I suspect a trick
here, — some other lover in the case who wants to come
over the stars ; — but it won't do. I '11 tell you what, young
woman (to her), if this is a cloak, you had better try it
on elsewhere; — in plain English, if you have any object
to gain and think to gain it by frightening me, it 's all my
eye and, and — yourself, Miss Martin.
BETSY. Well, then, if you will rush upon your fate, — there
(pointing off) — that's the door at the end of that long
passage and across the gravelled yard. The room is built
away from the house on purpose.
TOM. I '11 make for it at once, and the first object I inspect
through that same telescope, which now and then grows
to your master's eye, shall be the moon — the moon, which is
THE LAMPLIGHTER 411
SC. Ill]
the emblem of jour inconstant and deceitful sex, Miss
Martin.
Duet.
AIR — ' The Young May-moon.'
TOM. There comes a new moon twelve times a year.
BETSY. And when there is none, all is dark and drear.
TOM. In which I espy —
BETSY. And so, too, do I —
BOTH. A resemblance to womankind very clear.
BOTH. There comes a new moon twelve times in a year;
And when there is none, all is dark and drear.
TOM. In which I espy —
BETSY. And so do I —
BOTH. A resemblance to womankind very clear.
Second Verse.
TOM. She changes, she 's fickle, she drives men mad.
BETSY. She comes to bring light, and leaves them sad.
TOM. So restless wild —
BETSY. But so sweetly wild —
BOTH. That no better companion could be had.
BOTH. There comes a new moon twelves times a year ;
And when there is none, all is dark and drear.
TOM. In which I espy —
BETSY. And so do I —
BOTH. A resemblance to womankind very clear.
[Exeunt.
SCENE III. — A large gloomy room; a window with a telescope
directed towards the sky without, a table covered with
books, instruments and apparatus, which are also scat-
tered about in other parts of the chamber, a dim lamp, a
pair of globes, etc., a skeleton in a case, and various
uncouth objects displayed against the walla. Two doors
in flat. MR. MOONEY discovered, with a very dirty
face, busily engaged in blowing a fire, upon which is o
crucible.
412 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. in
Enter MR. STARGAZER, with a lamp, beckoning to TOM
GRIG, who enters with some unwillingness.
MR. STARGAZER. This, Mr. Grig, is the sanctum sanctorum
of which I have already spoken ; this is at once the labora-
tory and observatory.
TOM. It's not an over-lively place, is it?
MR. STARGAZER. It has an air of solemnity which well ac-
cords with the great and mysterious pursuits that are here
in constant prosecution, Mr. Grig.
TOM. Ah! I should think it would suit an undertaker to the
life; or perhaps I should rather say to the death. What
may that cheerful object be now? (Pointing to a large
phial. )
MR. STARGAZER. That contains a male infant with three
heads, — we use it in astrology ; — it is supposed to be a
charm.
TOM. I shouldn't have supposed it myself, from his appear-
ance. The young gentleman isn't alive, is he?
MR. STARGAZER. No, he is preserved in spirits. (MR.
MOONEY sneezes.)
TOM (retreating into a corner). Halloa! What the —
(MR. MOONEY looks vacantly round.) That gentleman,
I suppose, is out of spirits?
MR. STARGAZER (laying his hand upon TOM'S arm and look-
ing toward the philosopher). Hush! that is the gifted
Mooney. Mark well his noble countenance, — intense
thought beams from every lineament. That is the great
astrologer.
TOM. He looks as if he had been having a touch at the black
art. I say, why don't he say something?
MR. STARGAZER. He is in a state of abstraction; see he di-
rects his bellows this way, and 'blows upon the empty air.
TOM. Perhaps he sees a strange spark in this direction and
wonders how he came here. I wish he 'd blow me out.
(Aside.) I don't half like this.
MR. STARGAZER. You shall see me rouse him.
TOM. Don't put yourself out of the way on my account;
I can make his acquaintance at any other time.
THE LAMPLIGHTER 418
ic. in]
ME. STARGAZER. No time like the time present. Nothing
awakens him from these fits of meditation but an electric
shock. We always have a strongly charged battery on
purpose. I '11 give him a shock directly. (Ma. STAR-
GAZER goes up and cautiously places the end of a wire in
MR. MOONEY'S hand. He then stoops down betide the
table as though bringing it in contact with the battery.
MR. MOONEY immediately jumps up with a loud cry and
throws away the bellows.)
TOM (squaring at the philosopher). It wasn't me, you know,
none of your nonsense.
MR. STARGAZER (comes hastily forward). Mr. Grig, — Mr.
Grig, — not that disrespectful attitude to one of the great-
est men that ever lived. This, my dear friend (to
MOONEY), — is the noble stranger.
MR. MOONEY. A ha!
MR. STARGAZER. Who arrived, punctual to his time, this
afternoon.
MR. MOONEY. O ha!
MR. STARGAZER. Welcome him, my friend, — give him your
hand. (MR. MOONEY appears confused and raises hit
leg.) No — no, that's your foot. So absent, Mr. Grig,
in his gigantic meditations that very often he doesn't know
one from the other. Yes, that 's your hand, very good, my
dear friend, very good (pats MOONEY on the back as he
and TOM shake hands, the latter at arm's length).
MR. STARGAZER. Have you made any more discoveries during
my absence?
MR. MOONEY. Nothing particular.
MR. STARGAZER. Do you think — do you think, my dear
friend, that we shall arrive at any great stage in our
labours, anything at all approaching to their final con-
summation in the course of the night?
MR. MOONEY. I cannot take upon myself to say.
MR. STARGAZER. What are your opinions upon the subject!
MR. MOONEY. I haven't any opinions upon any subject what-
soever
Ma. STARGAZER. Wonderful man! Here's a mind, Mr.
Grig.
414 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. in
TOM. Yes, his conversation 's very improving indeed. But
what 's he staring so hard at me for?
ME. STARGAZER. Something occurs to him. Don't speak, —
don't disturb the current of his reflections upon any ac-
count. (MR. MOONEY walks solemnly up to TOM, who
retreats before him; taking off his hat turns it over and
over with a thoughtful countenance and finally puts it upon
his own head.)
MR. STARGAZER. Eccentric man !
TOM. I say, I hope he don't mean to keep that, because if
he does, his eccentricity is unpleasant. Give him another
shock and knock it off, will you?
MR. STARGAZER. Hush! hush! not a word. (MR. MOONEY,
keeping his eyes fixed on TOM, slowly returns to MR. STAR-
GAZER and whispers in his ear.)
MR. STARGAZER. Surely; by all means. I took the date of
his birth, and all other information necessary for the
purpose just now. (To TOM.) Mr. Mooney suggests
that we should cast your nativity without delay, in order
that we may communicate to you your future destiny.
MR. MOONEY. Let us retire for that purpose.
MR. STARGAZER. Certainly, wait here for a few moments,
Mr. Grig : we are only going into the little laboratory and
will return immediately. Now, my illustrious friend.
(He takes up a lamp and leads the way to one of the doors.
As MR. MOONEY follows, TOM steals behind him and re-
gains his hat. MR. MOONEY turns round, stares, and exit
through door.)
TOM. Well, that 's the queerest genius I ever came across, —
rather a singular person for a little smoking party.
(Looks into the crucible.) This is the saucepan, I sup-
pose, where they 're boiling the philosopher's stone down
to the proper consistency. I hope it 's nearly done ; when
it 's quite ready, I '11 send out for sixpenn'orth of sprats,
and turn 'em into gold fish for a first experiment. 'Cod !
it '11 be a comfortable thing though to have no end to
one's riches. I '11 have a country house and a park, and
I '11 plant a bit of it with a double row of gas-lamps a
mile long, and go out with a French polished mahogany
THE LAMPLIGHTER 415
SC. Ill]
ladder, and two servants in livery behind me, to light 'em
with my own hands every night. What 's to be seen here?
{Looks through telescope.) Nothing particular, the stop-
per being on at the other end. The little boy with three
heads (looking towards the case). What a comfort he
must have been to his parents! — Halloa! (taking up a
large knife) this is a disagreeable-looking instrument, —
something too large for bread and cheese, or oysters, and
not of a bad shape for sticking live persons in the ribs.
A very dismal place this, — I wish they 'd come back. Ah !
— (coming' upon the skeleton) here's a ghastly object, —
what does the writing say? — (reads a label upon the case)
'Skeleton of a gentleman prepared by Mr. Mooney.' I
hope Mr. Mooney may not be in the habit of inviting
gentlemen here, and making 'em into such preparations
without their own consent. Here 's a book, now. What 's
all this about, I wonder? The letters look as if a steam-
engine had printed 'em by accident. (Turns over the
leaves, spelling to himself.)
GALILEO enters softly unseen by TOM, who has his back
. towards him.
GALILEO (aside). Oh, you're there, are you? If I could
but suffocate him, not for life, but only till I am one-
and twenty, and then revive him, what a comfort and
convenience it would be! I overheard my cousin Fanny
talking to Betsy about coming here. What can she want
here? If she can be false, — false to me; — it seems im-
possible, but if she is?— well, well, we shall see. If I can
reach that lumber-room unseen, Fanny Brown,— beware.
(He steals toward the door on the ^L.—open* it, and exit
cautiously into the room. As he does so, TOM turn* the
other way.) . .
TOM (closing the book). It's very pretty Greek, I think.
What a time they are!
MR. STARGAZER and MOONEY enter from room.
MOONEY. Tell the noble gentleman of his irrevocable des-
tiny.
416 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. in
MR. STARGAZER (with emotion). No, — no, prepare him first.
TOM (aside). Prepare him! 'prepared by Mr. Mooney.'—
This is a case of kidnapping and slaughter. (To them.)
Let him attempt to prepare me at his peril !
MR. STARGAZER. Mr. Grig, why this demonstration?
TOM. Oh, don't talk to me of demonstrations ; — you ain't
going to demonstrate me, and so I tell you.
MR. STARGAZER. Alas! (Crossing to him.) The truth we
have to communicate requires but little demonstration from
our feeble lips. We have calculated upon your nativity.
MOONEY. Yes, we have, we have.
MR. STARGAZER. Tender-hearted man! (MOONEY weeps.)
See there, Mr. Grig, isn't that affecting?
TOM. What is he piping his boiled gooseberry eye for, sir?
How should I know whether it Js affecting or not ?
MR. STARGAZER. For you, for you. We find that you will
expire to-morrow two months, at thirty minutes — wasn't it
thirty minutes, my friend?
MOONEY. Thirty-five minutes, twenty-seven seconds and five-
sixths of a second. Oh! (Groans.)
MR. STARGAZER. Thirty-five minutes, twenty-seven seconds,
and five-sixths of a second past nine o'clock.
MOONEY. A.M. (They both wipe their eyes.)
TOM (alarmed). Don't tell me, you 've made a mistake some-
where;— I won't believe it.
MOONEY. No, it is all correct, we worked it all in the most
satisfactory manner. — Oh! (Groans again.)
- TOM. Satisfactory, sir! Your notions of the satisfactory
are of an extraordinary nature.
MR. STARGAZER (producing a pamphlet). It is confirmed
by the prophetic almanack. Here is the prediction for
to-morrow two months, — 'The decease of a great person
may be looked for about this time.'
TOM (dropping into his chair). That's me! It's all up!
inter me decently, my friends.
MR. STARGAZER (shaking his hand). Your wishes shall be
attended to. We must have the marriage with my niece
at once, in order that your distinguished race may be
transmitted to posterity. Condole with him, my Mooney,
THE LAMPLIGHTER 417
SC. Ill]
while I compose my feelings, and settle the preliminaries
of the marriage in solitude.
(Takes up lamp and exit into room R. MOONEY draw*
up a chair in a line with TOM, a long -way off. They
both sigh heavily. GALILEO opens the lumber-room
door. As he does so the room door opens and BETSY
steals softly in, beckoning to EMMA and FANNY who
follow. He retires again abruptly.)
BETSY (aside). Now, young ladies, if you take heart only
for one minute you may frighten Mr. Mooney out of
being married at once.
EMMA. But if he has serious thoughts?
BETSY. Nonsense, Miss, he hasn't any thoughts. Your papa
says to him, 'Will you marry my daughter?' and he says,
'Yes, I will'; and he would'and will if you ain't bold, but
bless you, he never turned it over in his mind for a minute.
If you, Miss (to EMMA), pretend to hate him and love a
rival, and you, Miss (to FANNY), to love him to distraction,
you '11 frighten him so betwixt you that he '11 declare off
directly, I warrant. The love will frighten him quite as
much as the hate. He never saw a woman in a passion,
and as to one in love, I don't believe that anybody but his
mother ever kissed that grumpy old face of his in all his
born days. Now, do try him, ladies. Come, we 're losing
time.
(She conceals herself behind the skeleton case. EMMA
rushes up to TOM GRIG and embraces him, while
FANNY clasps MOONEY round the neck. GALILEO
appears at his door in an attitude of amazement, and
MR. STARGAZER at his, after running in again with
the lamp, which before he sees what is going forward
he had in his hand. TOM and MOONEY in great as-
tonishment. )
FANNY (*o MOONEY). jHush, hush,
EMMA (to GRIG).
(ToM GRIG and MOONEY get their heads sufficiently out of
embrace to exchange a look of wonder.)
EMMA. Dear Mr. Grig, I know you must consider this
strange, -extraordinary, unaccountable conduct.
418 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. in
TOM. Why, ma'am, without explanation, it does appear
singular.
EMMA. Yes, yes, I know it does, I know it will, but the
urgency of the case must plead my excuse. Too fas-
cinating Mr. Grig, I have seen you once and only once,
but the impression of that maddening interview can never
be effaced. I love you to distraction. (FaUs upon his
shoulder. )
TOM. You 're extremely obliging, ma'am, it 's a flattering
sort of thing, — or it would be {aside) if I was going to
live a little longer, — but you 're not the one, ma'am ; —
it 's the other lady that the stars have —
FANNY (to MOONEY). Nay, wonderful being, hear me —
this is not a time for false conventional delicacy. Wrapt
in your sublime visions, you have not [perceived]1 the
silent tokens of a woman's first and all-absorbing attach-
ment, which have been, I fear, but too perceptible in the
eyes of others ; but now I must speak out. I hate this
odious man. You are my first and only love. Oh! speak
to me.
MOONEY. I haven't anything appropriate to say, young
woman. I think I had better go. (Attempting to get
away. )
FANNY. Oh! no, no, no (detaining him). Give me some
encouragement. Not one kind word? not one look of love?
MOONEY. I don't know how to look a look of love. — I 'm,
I 'm frightened.
TOM. So am I! I don't understand this. I tell you, Miss,
that the other lady is my destined wife. Upon my word
you mustn't hug me, you '11 make her jealous.
FANNY. Jealous! of you! Hear me (to MOONEY). I re-
nounce all claim or title to the hand of that or any other
man and vow to be eternally and wholly yours.
MOONEY. No, don't, you can't be mine, — nobody can be
mine. — I don't want anybody — I — I —
EMMA. If you will not hear her — hear me, detested monster.
i The word in brackets is wanting in the manuscript, and is here
supplied conjecturally to complete the sense. See, however, Reprinted
Pieces, 'The Lamplighter's Story.' — ED.
THE LAMPLIGHTER 419
SC. Ill]
— -Hear me declare that sooner than be your bride, with
this deep passion for another rooted in my heart, — I
MOONEY. You need not make any declaration on the subject,
young woman.
ME. STARGAZER (coming forward). She shan't, — she shan't.
That 's right, don't hear her. She shall marry you whether
she likes it or not, — she shall marry you to-morrow morn-
ing,— and you, Miss (to FANNY), shall marry Mr. Grig
if I trundle you to church in a wheelbarrow.
GALILEO (coming forward). So she shall! so she may! Let
her ! let her ! I give her leave.
MR. STARGAZER. You give her leave, you young dog ! Who
the devil cares whether you give her leave or not? and what
are you spinning about in that way for?
GALILEO. I 'm fierce, I 'm furious, — don't talk to me, — I shall
do somebody a mischief ; — I '11 never marry anybody after
this, never, never, it isn't safe. I '11 live and die a bachelor !
• — there — a bachelor! a bachelor! (He goes up and en-
counters BETSY. She talks to him apart, and his wrath
seems gradually to subside.)
MOONEY. The little boy, albeit of tender years, has spoken
wisdom. I have been led to the contemplation of woman-
kind. I find their love is too violent for my staid habits.
I would rather npt venture upon the troubled waters of
matrimony.
MR. STARGAZER. You don't mean to marry my daughter?
Not if I say she shall have you? (MOONEY shakes his
head solemnly.) Mr. Grig, you have not changed your
mind because of a little girlish folly?
TOM. To-morrow two months! I may as well get through
as much gold as I can in the meantime. Why, sir, if the
pot nearly boils (pointing to the crucible)* — if you 're
pretty near the philosopher's stone, —
MR. STARGAZER. Pretty near! We're sure of it — certain;
it 's as good as money in the Bank. (GALILEO and BETSY,
who have been listening attentively, bustle about, fanning
the fire, and throwing in sundry powders from the bottles
on the table, then cautiously retire to a distance.)
420 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[SC. Ill
TOM. If that 's the case, sir, I am ready to keep faith with
the planets. I '11 take her, sir, I '11 take her.
MR. STARGAZER. Then here 's her hand, Mr. Grig, — no re-
sistance, Miss (drawing FANNY forward). It's of no use,
so you may as well do it with a good grace. Take her
hand, Mr. Grig. (The crucible blows up with a loud
crash; they all start.)
MR. STARGAZEH. What! — the labour of fifteen years de-
stroyed in an instant!
MOONET (stooping over the •fragments). That's the only
disappointment I have experienced in this process since I
was first engaged in it when I was a boy. It always blows
up when it 's on the point of succeeding.
TOM. Is the philosopher's stone gone?
MOONEY. No.
TOM. Not gone, sir?
MOONEY. No — it never came!
MR. STARGAZER. But we '11 get it, Mr. Grig. Don't be cast
down, we shall discover it in less than fifteen years this
time, I dare say.
TOM (relinquishing FANNY'S hand). Ah! Were the stars very
positive about this union?
MR. STARGAZER. They had not a doubt about it. They said
it was to be, and it must be. They were peremptory.
TOM. I am sorry for that, because they have been very civil
to me in the way of showing a light now and then, and I
really regret disappointing 'em. But under the peculiar
circumstances of the case, it can't be.
MR. STARGAZER. Can't be, Mr. Grig! What can't be?
TOM. The marriage, sir. I forbid the banns. (Retires and
sits down.)
MR. STARGAZER. Impossible! such a prediction unfulfilled!
Why, the consequences would be as fatal as those of a
concussion between the comet and this globe. Can't be!
it must be, shall be.
BETSY (coming forward, follow€d by GALILEO). If you
please, sir, may I say a word?
MR. STARGAZER. What have you got to say? — speak, woman !
BETSY. Why, sir, I don't think Mr. Grig is the right man.
THE LAMPLIGHTER 421
SC. Ill]
STARGAZER. What!
BETSY. Don't you recollect, sir, that just as the house-clock
struck the first stroke of five, you gave Mr. Galileo a thump
on the head with the butt end of your telescope, and told
him to get out of the way ?
MR. STARGAZER. Well, if I did, what of that?
BETSY. Why, then, sir, I say, and I would say it if I was to
be killed for it, that he ss the young gentleman that ought
to marry Miss Fanny, and that the stars never meant
anything else.
MR. STARGAZER. He ! Why, he 's a little boy.
GALILEO. I ain't. I 'm one-and-twenty next Lady-day.
MR. STARGAZER. Eh! Eighteen hundred and — why, so he
is, I declare. He 's quite a stranger to me, certainly. I
never thought about his age since he was fourteen, and I
remember that birthday, because he 'd a new suit of clothes
then. But the noble family —
BETSY. Lor', sir! ain't it being of a noble family to be the
son of such a clever man as you?
ME. STARGAZER. That 's true. And my mother's father
would have been Lord Mayor, only he died of turtle the
year before.
BETSY. Oh, it 's quite clear.
MX. STARGAZER. The only question is about the time, be
cause the church struck afterwards. But I should think
the stars, taking so much interest in my house, would most
likely go by the house-clock,— eh ! Mooney?
MOONEY. Decidedly, — yes.
MR. STARGAZER. Then you may have her, my son. Her
father was a great astronomer; so I hope that, though
you are a blockhead, your children may be scientific.
There! (Join* their hands.)
EMMA. Am I free to marry who I like, papa?
MR. STARGAZER. Won't you, Mooney? Won't you?
MOONEY. If anybody asks me to again I '11 run away, and
never come back any more.
MR. STARGAZER. Then we must drop the subject. Yes, your
choice is now unfettered.
EMMA. Thank you, dear papa. Then I '11 look about for
422 THE LAMPLIGHTER
[sc. in
somebody who will suit me without the delay of an instant
longer than is absolutely necessary.
MR. STARGAZER. How very dutiful !
FANNY. And, as my being here just now with Emma was a
little trick of Betsy's, I hope you '11 forgive her, uncle.
EMMA. j , ,
GALILEO, i Oh, yes, do.
FANNY. And even reward her, uncle, for being instrumental
in fulfilling the prediction.
GALILEO, i Oh' yes ' do reward her — do-
FANNY. Perhaps you could find a husband for her, uncle, you
know. Don't you understand?
BETSY. Pray don't mention it, Miss. I told you at first,
Miss, that I had not the least wish or inclination to have
Mr. Grig to myself. I couldn't abear that Mr. Grig
should think I wanted him to marry me; oh no, Miss, not
on any account.
MK. STARGAZER. Oh, that 's pretty intelligible. Here, Mr.
Grig. (They fall back from his chair.) Have you any
objection to take this young woman for better, for worse?
BETSY. Lor', sir! how ondelicate!
MR. STARGAZER. I '11 add a portion of ten pounds for your
loss of time here to-night. What do you say, Mr. Grig?
TOM. It don't much matter. I ain't long for this world.
Eight weeks of marriage might reconcile me to my fate.
I should go off, I think, more resigned and peaceful. Yes,
I'll take her, as a reparation. Come to my arms! (He
embraces her with a dismal face.)
MR. STARGAZER (taking a paper from his pocket). Egad!
that reminds me of what I came back to say, which all this
bustle drove out of my head. There 's a figure wrong in
the nativity (handing the paper to MOONEY). He '11 live
to a green old age.
TOM (looking up). Eh! What?
MOONEY. So he will. Eighty-two years and twelve days will
be the lowest.
TOM (disengaging himself). Eh! here! (calling off). Hallo,
you, sir! bring in that ladder and lantern.
THE LAMPLIGHTER 423
SC. Ill]
A Servant enters in great haste, and hands them to TOM.
SERVANT. There's such a row in the street, — none of the
gas-lamps lit, and all the people calling for the lamplighter.
Such, a row! (Rubbing his hands with great glee.)
TOM. Is there, my fine fellow? Then I'll go and light 'em.
And as, under existing circumstances, and with the pros-
pect of a green old age before me, I 'd rather not be mar-
ried, Miss Martin, I beg to assure the ratepayers present
that in future I shall pay the strictest attention to my
professional duties, and do my best for the contractor;
and that I shall be found upon my beat as long as they
condescend to patronise the Lamplighter. (Runs off,
Miss MARTIN faints in the arms of MOONEY.)
CURTAIN
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
A FARCE
IN ONE ACT
[1851]
BY CHARLES DICKENS AND MARK LEMON
DRAMATIS PERSONS
AT DEVONSHIRE HOUSE, TUESDAY, May 27, 1851
MR. NIGHTINGALE . . .
MR. GABBLEWIG (of the Middle Tem-
ple} . .
TIP (his Tiger) ....
SLAP (professionally Mr. Formiville) .
LITHERS (landlord of the 'Water-Lily")
ROSINA .....
SUSAN .
MR. DUDLEY COSTELLO.
MR. CHARLES DICKENS.
MR. AUGUSTUS EGG.
MR. MARK LEMON.
MR. WILKIE COLLINS.
Miss ELLEN CHAPLIN.
MRS. Cos.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
SCENE. — The Common Room of the Water-Lily Hotel at
Malvern. Door and Window in flat. A carriage stopg,
Door-bell rings violently.
TIP (without). Now, then! Wai-ter! Landlord! Somebody!
(Enter TIP, through door, with a quantity of luggage.)
Enter LITHEES, L., running in.
LITHERS. Here you are, my boy.
TIP (much offended). My boy! Who are you boying of!
Don't do it. I won't have it. The worm will turn if it *g
trod upon.
LITHERS. I never trod upon you.
TIP. What do you mean by calling me a worm?
LITHERS. You called yourself one. You ought to know what
you are better than I do.
GABBLEWIG (without). Has anybody seen that puppy of
mine — answers to the name of 'Tip* — with a gold-lace
collar? (Enters.) Oh, here you are! You scoundrel,
where have you been?
LITHERS. Good gracious me! Why, if it ain't Mr. Gabble-
wig, Junior!
GABBLEWIG. What, Lithers! Do you turn up at Malvern
Wells, of all the places upon earth?
LITHERS. Bless you, sir, I 've been landlord of this little
place these two years! Ever since you did me that great
kindness — ever since you paid out that execution for me
when I was in the greengrocery way, and used to wait at
your parties in the Temple — which is five years ago come
Christmas— I 've been (through a little legacy my wife
dropped into) in the public line. I 'm overjoyed to see
you, sir. How do you do, sir? Do you find yourself
pretty well, sir?
427
428 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
GABBLEWIG (moodily seating himself). Why, no, I can't say
I am pretty well.
TIP. No more ain't I.
GABBLEWIG. Be so good as to take those boots of yours into
the kitchen, sir.
TIP (reluctantly). Yes, sir.
GABBLEWIG. And the baggage into my bedroom.
TIP. Yes, sir. (Aside.) Here's a world! [Exit, L.
LITHERS. The Queen's Counsellor, that is to be, looks very
down — uncommonly down. Something 's wrong. I won-
der what it is. Can't be debt. Don't look like drinking.
Hope it isn't dice! Ahem! Beg your pardon, Mr. Gab-
blewig, but you 'd wish to dine, sir? He don't hear.
( Gets round, dusting the table as he goes, and at last stoops
his head so as to come face to face tdth him.) What
would you choose for dinner, Mr. Gabblewig?
GABBLEWIG. O, ah, yes ! Give me some cold veal.
LITHERS. Cold veal ! He 's out of his mind.
GABBLEWIG. I 'm a miserable wretch. I was going to be
married. I am not going to be married. The young
lady's uncle refuses to consent. It 's all off — all over —
all up !
LITHERS. But there are other young ladies —
GABBLEWIG. Don't talk nonsense.
LITHERS (aside). All the rest are cold veal, I suppose. But,
— you '11 excuse my taking the liberty, being so much
beholden to you, — but couldn't anything be done to get
over the difficulty?
GABBLEWIG. Nothing at all. How's it possible? Do yon
know the nature of the uncle's objection? But of course
you don't. I '11 tell you. He says I speak too fast, and
am too slow, — want reality of purpose, and all that. He
says I 'm all words. What the devil else does he suppose
I can be, being a lawyer ! He says I happen to be counsel
for his daughter just now, but after marriage might be
counsel for the opposite side. He says I am wanting in
earnestness, — deficient in moral go-aheadism.
LITHERS. In which?
GABBLEWIG. Just so. In consequence of which you behold
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 429
before you a crushed flower. I am shut up and done for, —
the peace of the valley is fled; — I have come down here
to see if the cold-water cure will have any effect on a
broken heart. Having had a course of wet blanket, I
am going to try the wet sheet; — dare say I shall finish
before long with a daisy counterpane.
LITHERS (aside). Everybody 's bit by the cold water. It will
be the ruin of our business.
GABBLEWIG. If the waters of Malvern were the waters of
Lethe, I 'd take a douche forty feet high, this afternoon,
and drink five-and- twenty tumblers before breakfast to-
morrow morning. Anything to wash out the tormenting
remembrance of Rosina Nightingale.
LITHERS. Nightingale, Mr. Gabblewig?
GABBLEWIG. Nightingale. As the Shakespeare duet went, ii>
the happy days of our amateur plays:
The Nightingale alone,
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean'd her breast uptil a thorn.
I *ve no doubt she 's doing it at the present moment — or
leaning her head against the drawing-room window, look-
ing across the Crescent. It 's all the same
LITHERS. The Crescent, Mr. Gabblewig?
GABBLEWIG. The Crescent.
LITHERS. Not at Bath?
GABBLEWIG. At Bath.
LITHERS (feeling- m his pockets). Good gracious! (Gives
a letter.} Look at that, sir.
GABBLEWIG. The cramped hand of the obstinate old bird,
who might, could, and should have been— and wouldn't be
my father-in-law i (Reads.) 'Christopher Nightingale's
compliments to the landlord of the Water-Lily, at Malvern
Wells.'
LITHERS. The present establishment.
GABBLEWIG (reading). 'And hearing it is a quiet, unpre-
tending, weU-conducted house, requests to have the lol-
lowing rooms prepared for him on Tuesday afternoon.
LITHERS. The present afternoon.
430 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
GABBLEWIG (reading). 'Namely, a private sitting-room with
a' — what! a weed? He don't smoke.
LITHERS (looking over his shoulder). A view, sir.
GABBLEWIG. Oh! 'with a view.' Ay, ay. 'A bedroom for
Christopher N. with a' — what? with a wormy pew?
LITHERS (looking over 7m shoulder). A warming-pan.
GABBLEWIG. To be sure ; but it 's as like one as the other.
'With a warming-pan, and two suitable chambers for Miss
Rosina Nightingale.' — Support me.
LITHERS. Hold up, Mr. Gabblewig.
GABBLEWIG. You might knock me down with a feather.
LITHERS. But you needn't knock me down with a barrister.
Hold up, sir.
GABBLEWIG (reading). 'And her maid. Christopher Night-
ingale intends to try the cold-water cure.'
LITHERS. I beg your pardon, sir. What 's his complaint?
GABBLEWIG. Nothing.
LITHERS (shaking his head). He'll never get over it, sir.
Of all the invalids that come down here, the invalids that
have nothing the matter with them are the hopeless cases.
GABBLEWIG (reading). 'Cold-water cure, having drunk (sec
Diary) four hundred and sixty-seven gallons, three pints
and a half of the various celebrated waters of England and
Germany, and proved them all to be humbugs. He
has likewise proved (see Diary) all pills to be humbugs.
Miss Rosina Nightingale, being rather low, will also try
the cold-water cure, which will probably rouse her.' —
Never !
Perhaps she, like me, may struggle with —
(And I have no doubt of it, Lithers, for she has the tender-
est heart in the world)
Some feeling of regret
(awakened by the present individual).
But if she loved as I have loved,
(And I have no doubt she did — and does)
She never can forget.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 431
(And she won't, I feel convinced, if it 's only in obstinacy.)
(Gives back letter.)
LITHERS. Well, sir, what '11 you do? I'm entirely devoted
to you, and ready to serve you in any way. Will you
have a ladder from the builder's, and run away with the
young lady in the middle of the night; or would the key
of the street-door be equally agreeable?
GABBLEWIG. Neither. Can't be done. If it could be done I
should have done it at Bath. Grateful duty won't admit
of union without consent of uncle — uncle won't give con-
sent;— stick won't beat dog, — dog won't bite pig, — pig
won't get over the stile; — and so the lovers will never be
married? (Sitting down as before.) Give me the cold
veal, and the day before yesterday's paper.
[Exit LITHERS, L., and immediately returns with papers.
SXAP (without). Halloa, here! My name is Formiville. Is
Mr. Formiville's luggage arrived? Several boxes were
sent on beforehand for Mr. Formiville; are those boxes
here? (Entering at door, preceded by LITHERS, who bows
him in.) Do you hear me, my man? Has Mr. Formi-
ville's luggage — I am Mr. Formiville — arrived?
LITHERS. Quite safely, sir, yesterday. Three boxes, sir, and
a pair of foils.
SLAP. And a pair of foils. The same. Very good. Take
this cap. (LITHERS puts it down.) Good. Put these
gloves in the cap. (LITHERS does so.) Good. Give me
the cap again, it 's cold. (He does so.) Very good. Are
you the landlord?
LITHEKS. I am Thomas Lithers, the landlord, sir.
SLAP. Very good. You write in the title-pages of all your
books, no doubt: —
Thomas Lithers is my name,
And landlord is my station ;
Malvern Wells my dwelling-place,
And Chalk my occupation.
What have you got to eat, my man ?
LITHERS. Well, sir, we could do you a nice steak ; or we could
toss you up a cutlet ; or —
432 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
SLAP. What have you ready dressed, my man?
LITHERS. We have a very fine York ham, and a beautiful
fowl, sir —
SLAP. Produce them! Let the banquet be served. Stay;
have you —
LITHERS (rubbing his hands). Well, sir, we have, and I can
strongly recommend it.
SLAP. To what may that remark refer, my friend?
LITHERS. I thought you mentioned Rhine-wine, sir.
SLAP. O truly. Yes, I think I did. Yes, I am sure I did.
Is it very fine?
LITHERS. It is uncommon fine, sir. Liebfraumilch of the
most delicious quality.
SLAP. You may produce a flask. The price is no considera-
tion (aside) — as I shall never pay for it.
LITHERS. Directly, sir.
SLAP. So. He bites. He will be done. If he will be done
he must be done. I can't help it. Thus men rush upon
their fate. A stranger? Hum 1 Your servant, sir. My
name is Formiville —
GABBLEWIG (who has previously observed him). Of several
provincial theatres, I believe, and formerly engaged to
assist an amateur company at Bath, under the manage-
ment of —
SLAP (with a theatrical pretence of being affected). Mr.
Gabblewig ! Heavens ! This recognition is so sudden, so
unlocked for, — it unmans me. (Aside.) Owe him fifteen
pounds, four shirts, and a waistcoat. Hope he 's forgot-
ten the loan of those trifles. — O sir, if I drop a tear upon
that hand —
GABBLEWIG. Consider it done. Suppose the tear, as we used
to say at rehearsal. How are you going on? You have
left the profession?
SLAP (aside). Or the profession left me. I either turned it
off, or it turned me off; all one. (Aloud.) Yes, Mr.
Gabblewig, I am now living on a little property — that is,
I have expectations — (aside) of doing an old gentleman.
GABBLEWIG. I have my apprehensions, Mr. Formiville, other-
wise I believe, Mr. Slap —
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 433
SLAP. Slap, sir, was my father's name. Do not reproach
me with the misfortunes of my ancestors.
GABBLEWIG. I was about to say, Slap, otherwise Formiville,
that I have a very strong belief that you have been for
some time established in the begging-letter-writing business.
And when a gentleman of that description drops a tear
on my hand, my hand has a tendency to drop itself on his
nose.
SLAP. I don't understand you, sir.
GABBLEWIG. I see you don't. Now the danger is, that I,
Gabblewig, may take the profession of the law into my
own hands, and eject Slap, otherwise Formiville, from the
nearest casement or window, being at a height from the
ground not exceeding five-and-twenty feet.
SLAP (angrily). Sir, I perceive how it is. A vindictive old
person, of the name of Nightingale, who denounced me
to the Mendicity Society, and who has pursued me in vari-
ous ways, has prejudiced your mind somehow, publicly or
privately, against an injured and calumniated victim. But
let that Nightingale beware ; for, if the Nightingale is not
a bird, though an old one, that I will catch yet once again
with chaff, and clip the wings of, too, I'm. — (Aside.)
Confound my temper, where 's it running? (Affects to
Keep in silence.)
GABBLEWIG (aside). Oho! That's what brings him here, is
it? A trap for the Nightingales! I may show the old
fellow that I have some purpose in me, after all! — Those
amateur dresses among my baggage! — Lithers's assistance
— done! Mr. Formiville.
SLAP (with injured dignity). Sir!
GABBLEWIG (taking up hat and stick). As I am not ambitious
of the honour of your company, I shall leave you in pos-
session of this apartment. I believe you are rather absent,
are you not?
SLAP. Sir, I am, rather so.
GABBLEWIG. Exactly. Then you will do me the favour to
observe that the spoons and forks of this establishment are
the private property of the landlord. [Exit, L.
SLAP. And that man wallows in eight hundred a year, and
434 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
half that sum would make my wife and children (if I had
any) happy!
Enter LITHERS (L.), with tray, on which are fowl, ham,
bread, and glasses.
But arise, black vengeance! Nightingale shall suffer
doubly. Nightingale found me out. When a man finds
me out in imposing on him, I never forgive him, — and
when he don't find me out, I never leave off imposing on
him. Those are my principles. What ho ! Wine here !
LJTHEUS (arranging table and chair). Wine coming sir, di-
rectly! My young man has gone below for it. (Bell
rings •without.) More company! Mr. Nightingale, be-
yond a doubt! (Showing him. in at door.) This way,
sir, if you please! Your letter received, sir, and your
roams prepared.
SLAP (looking off melodramatically before seating himself at
table). Is that the malignant whom these eyes have never
yet bel — asted with a look ? Caitiff, tereremble !
Sits, as NIGHTINGALE enters with ROSINA and SUSAN.'
NIGHTINGALE muffled in a shawl, and carrying a great-
coat.
NIGHTINGALE (to LITHERS). That'll do, that'll do. Don't
bother, sir. I am nervous, and can't bear to be bothered.
What I want is peace. Instead of peace, I 've got (look-
ing at ROSINA) what rhymes to it, and is not at all like
it. (Sits, covering his legs with his great-coat.)
ROSINA. O uncle ! Is it not enough that I am never to re-
deem those pledges which —
NIGHTINGALE. Don't talk to me about redeeming pledges, as
if I was a pawnbroker! Oh! (Starts.)
ROSINA. Are you ill, sir?
NIGHTINGALE. Am I ever anything else, ma'am ! Here !
Refer to Diary (gives book). Rosina, save me the trouble
of my glasses. See last Tuesday.
ROSINA. I see it, sir (turning over leaves).
NIGHTINGALE. What 's the afternoon entry ?
ROSINA (reading). 'New symptom. Crick in back. Sensa-
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 435
tion as if self a stiff boot- jack suddenly tried to be doubled
up by strong person.'
NIGHTINGALE (starts again). O'.
ROSINA. Symptom repeated, sir?
NIGHTINGALE. Symptom repeated. I must put it down.
( SUSAN brings chair, and produces screw-inkstand and pen
from her pocket. NIGHTINGALE takes the book on his
knee, and writes.) 'Symptom repeated' — Oh! (Starts
again. ) ' Symptom re-repeated.' ( Writes again. ) Mr.
Lithers, I believe?
LITHERS. At your service, sir.
NIGHTINGALE. Mr. Lithers, I am a nervous man, and require
peace. We had better come to an understanding. I am a
water patient, but I '11 pay for wine. You '11 be so good
as to call the pump sherry at lunch, port at dinner, and
brandy-and-water at night. Now, be so kind as to direct
the chambermaid to show this discontented young lady her
room.
LITHERS. Certainly, sir. This way, if you please, Miss
( He whispers her. She screams. )
NIGHTINGALE (alarmed). What's the matter?
ROSINA. O uncle! I felt as if — don't be frightened, uncle,
— as if something had touched me here ( with her hand upon
her heart) so unexpectedly, that I — don't be frightened,
uncle — that I almost dropped, uncle.
NIGHTINGALE. Lord bless me! Boot-jack and strong person
contagious! Susan, a mouthful of ink. (Dips his pen
m her inkstand, and writes.) 'Symptom shortly after-
wards repeated in niece.' Susan, you don't feel anything
particular, do you?
SUSAN. Nothing whatever, sir.
NIGHTINGALE. You never do. You are the most aggravat-
ing young woman in the world.
SUSAN. Lor', sir, you wouldn't wish a party ill, I 'm sure !
NIGHTINGALE. Ill ! you are ill, if you only knew it. If you
were as intimate with your own interior as I am with mine,
your hair would stand on end.
SUSAN. Then I 'm very glad of my ignorance, sir, for I wish
it to keep in curl. Now, Miss Rosina! (Exit ROSINA,
436 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
making a sign of secrecy to LITHERS, who goes before.)
Oho ! There 's something in the wind that 's not the boot-
jack! [Exit SUSAN, L.
NIGHTINGALE (seated). There's a man, yonder, eating his
dinner, as if he enjoyed it. I should say, from his figure,
that he generally did enjoy his dinner. I wish I did. I
wonder whether there is anything that would do me good.
I have tried hot water, and hot mud, and hot vapour, and
have imbibed all sorts of springs, from zero to boiling,
and have gone completely through the pharmacopoeia ; yet
I don't find myself a bit better. My Diary is my only
comfort. (Putting it into Ms great-coat pocket, uncon-
sciously drops it.) When I began to book my symptoms,
and to refer back of an evening, then I began to find out
my true condition. O! (starts) what's that? That's a
new symptom. Lord bless me ! Sensation as if small train
of gunpowder sprinkled from left hip to ankle, and ex-
ploded by successful Guy Fawkes. I must book it at once,
or I shall be taken with something else before it 's entered.
Susan, another mouthful of ink ! Most extraordinary !
[Exit, L.
(SLAP cautiously approaches the Diary; as he does so,
GABBLEWIG looks in and listens.)
SLAP. What 's this — hum ! A Diary, — remarkable passion
for pills, and quite a furor for doctors. — Very unconjugal
allusions to Mrs. Nightingale. — Poor Maria, most valua-
ble of sisters, to me an annuity, — to your husband a tor-
mentor. Hum! shall I bleed him, metaphorically bleed
him? Why not? He never regarded the claims of kin-
dred; why should I? He returns. (Puts down book.)
Re-enter NIGHTINGALE, looking about.
NIGHTINGALE. Bless my heart, I 've left my Diary somewhere.
O ! here is the precious volume — no doubt where I dropped
it. (Picks up book.) If the stranger had opened it, what
information he might have acquired ! He 'd have found
out, by analogy, things concerning himself that he little
dreams of. He has no idea how ill he is, or how thin he
ought to be. [Exit, L.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 437
SLAP. Now, then (tucking up his wristbands), for the fowl
in earnest! Where is that wine! Hallo, where is that
wine ?
Enter (L.) GABBLEWIG, disguised as Boots.
GABBLEWIG. Here you are, sir! (Starting.) What do I
behold! Mr. Formiville! the imminent tragedian?
SLAP. Who the devil are you? Keep off!
GABBLEWIG. What! Don't you remember me, sir?
SLAP. No, I don't indeed.
GABBLEWIG. Not wen I carried a banner, with a silver dragon
on it; wen you played the Tartar Prince, at What's-his-
name; and wen you used to bring the ouse down with that
there pint about rewenge, you know?
SLAP. What! Do you mean when I struck the attitude, and
said, 'Ar-recreant ! The Per-rincess and r-r-revenge are
both my own ! She is my per-risoner — Tereremble !'
GABBLEWIG. Never! This to decide. (They go through
the motions of a broadsword combat. SLAP, having been
run through the body, sits down and begins to eat vorar
ciously. GABBLEWIG, who has kept the bottle all the while,
sits opposite him at table.) Ah! Lor' bless me, what a
actor you was! (Drinks.) That's what I call the true
tragic fire — wen you strike it out of the swords. Give me
showers of sparks, and then I know what you 're up to !
Lor5 bless me, the way I Jve seen you perspire ! I shall
never see such a actor agin.
SLAP (complacently). I think you remember me.
GABBLEWIG. Think? Why, don't you remember, wen you
left Taunton, without paying that there washerwoman;
and wen she —
SLAP. You needn't proceed, it's quite clear you remember
me.
GABBLEWIG (drinks again). Lor5 bless my heart, yes, what
a actor you was! What a Romeo you was, you know.
(Drinks again.)
SLAP. I believe there was something in me, as Romeo.
GABBLEWIG. Ah ! and something of you, too, you know. Fhe
Montagues was a fine family, when you was the lightest
438 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
weight among 'era. And Lor' bless my soul, what a Prince
Henry you was ! I see you a drinking the sack now, I do !
(Drinks again.)
SLAP. I beg your pardon, my friend, is that my wine?
GABBLEWIG (affecting to meditate, and drinking again.)
Lor' bless me, wot a actor! I seem to go into a trance
like when I think of it. (/* fitting his glass again, when
SLAP comes round and takes the bottle. ) I '11 give you,
Formiville and the Draymer! Hooray! (Drinks, and
then takes a leg of the fowl in his fingers. SLAP removes
the dish.)
SLAP ( aside. ) At least he doesn't know that I was turned out
of the company in disgrace. That 's something. Are you
the waiter here, my cool but discriminative acquaintance?
GABBLEWIG. Well, I 'm a sort of a waiter and a sort of a
half-boots : I was with a Travelling Circus, arter I left you.
'The riders — the riders ! Be in time — be in time ! Now,
Mr. Merryman, all in to begin !' All that you know. But
I shall never see acting no more. It went right out with
you, bless you! (AH through this dialogue, whenever
SLAP, in a moment of confidence, replaces the fowl or wine,
GABBLEWIG helps himself.)
SLAP (aside). I '11 pump him — rule in life. Whenever no
other work on hand, pump! (To him.) I forget your
name.
GABBLEWIG. Bit: — Charley Bit. That 's my real name.
When I first went on with the banners, I was Blitherington-
fordbury. But they said it came so expensive in the print-
ing, that I left it off.
SLAP. Much business done in this house?
GABBLEWIG. Wery flat.
SLAP. Old gentleman in nankeen trowsers been here long?
GABBLEWIG. Just come. Wot do you think I 've heerd?
S'posed to be a bachelor, but got a wife.
SLAP. No!
GABBLEWIG. Yes.
SLAP. Got a wife, eh ? Ha, ha, ha ! You 're as sharp as a
lancet. Ha, ha, ha! Yes, yes, no doubt. Got a wife.
Yes, yes.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 439
GABBLEWIG (aside). Eh! A flash! The intense enjoyment
of my friend suggests to me that old Nightingale hasn't
got a wife,— that he 's free, but don't know it. Fraud !
Mum! (To him). I say, you're a— but Lor' bless my
soul, wot a actor you wos !
SLAP. It's really touching, his relapsing into that! But I
can't indulge him, poor fellow. My time is precious.
You were going to say —
GABBLEWIG. I was going to say, you are up to a thing or
two, and so — but, Lor* bless my heart alive, wot a Richard
the Third you wos! Wen you used to come the sliding
business, you know. (Both starting up and doing it.)
SLAP. This child of nature positively has judgment 1 It
was one of my effects. Calm yourself, good fellow. 'And
so' — you were observing —
GABBLEWIG (close to him, in a sudden whisper). And so I '11
tell you. He hasn't really got a wife. She's dead.
(SLAP starts, — GABBLEWIG aside.) I am right. He
knows it! Mrs. Nightingale 's as dead as a door-nail. (A
pause; they stand close together, looking at each other.)
SLAP. Indeed? (GABBLEWIG nods.) Some piece of cun-
ning, I suppose. (GABBLEWIG winks.) Buried some-
where, of course? (GABBLEWIG lays his fingers on his
nose.) Where? (GABBLEWIG looks a little disconcerted.)
All 's safe. No proof. (Aloud.) Takeaway.
GABBLEWIG (as he goes up to table). Too sudden on my
part. Formiville wins first knock-down blow. Never
mind. Gabblewig up again, and at him once more.
(Clears the table and takes the tray away.)
SLAP. How does he know? He's in the market. Shall I
buy him? Not yet. Necessity not yet proved. With
Nightingale here, and my dramatic trunks upstairs, I '11
strike at least another blow on the hot iron for myself,
before I think of taking a partner into the forge.
[Exit, L.
As GABBLEWIG returns from clearing away, enter SUSAN.
GABBLEWIG. Susan! Susan!
SUSAN. Susan, indeed! Well, diffidence ain't the prevailing
complaint at Malvern.
440 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
GABBLEWIG. Don't you know me? Mr. Gabble —
SUSAN. — Wig! Why, la, sir, then you 're the boot-jack!
Now I understand, of course.
GABBLEWIG. More than I do. I the boot-jack? Susan,
listen ! Did you know that Mr. Nightingale had been
married?
SUSAN. Why, I never heard it exactly.
GABBLEWIG. But you 've seen it, perhaps? Had a peep into
that eternal Diary — eh?
SUSAN. Well, sir, to say the pious truth, I did read one day
something or another about a — a wife. You see he mar-
ried a wife when he was very young.
GABBLEWIG. Yes.
SUSAN. And she was the plague of his life ever afterwards.
GABBLEWIG. O, Rosina, can such things be ! Yes. Susan, I
think you are a native of Malvern?
SUSAN. Yes, sir, leastways I was so, before I went to live in
London.
GABBLEWIG. You persuaded Mr. Nightingale to come down
here, in order that he might try the cold-water cure?
SUSAN. La, sir !
GABBLEWIG. And in order that you might see your relations?
SUSAN. La, sir, how did you know?
GABBLEWIG. Knowledge of human nature, Susan. Now rub
up your memory and tell me — did you ever know a Mrs.
Nightingale who lived down here? Think, — your eyes
brighten, — you smile; — you did know Mrs. Nightingale
who lived down here.
SUSAN. To be sure I did, sir; but that could never have
been —
GABBLEWIG. Your master's wife, — I suspect she was. She
died?
SUSAN. Yes, sir.
GABBLEWIG. And was buried?
SUSAN. You know everything.
GABBLEWIG. In —
SUSAN. Why, in Pershore churchyard; my uncle was sexton
there.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 441
GABBLEWIG. Uncle living?
SUSAN. Ninety years of age. With a trumpet.
GABBLEWIG. That he plays on?
SUSAN. Plays on? No. Hears with.
GABBLEWIG. Good. Susan, make it your business to get me
a certificate of the old lady's death, and that within an
hour.
SUSAN. Why, sir?
GABBLEWIG. Susan, I suspect the old lady walks, and I intend
to lay her ghost. You ask how?
SUSAN. No, sir, I didn't.
GABBLEWIG. You thought it. That you shall know by and
by. Here comes the old bird. Fly! (Exit SUSAN.)
Whilst I reconnoitre the enemy. [Exit, through door.
Enter NIGHTINGALE and ROSINA.
ROSINA. My dear uncle, pray do nothing rash: you are in
capital health at present, and who knows what the doctors
may make you.
NIGHTINGALE. Capital health? I've not known a day's
health for these twenty years. (Refers to Diary.)
* January 6th, 1834. Pain in right thumb: query, gout.
Send for Blair's pills. Take six. Can't sleep all night.
Doze about seven.' (Turns over leaf.) 'March 12th,
1839 : Violent cough : query, damp umbrella, left by church-
rates in hall? Try lozenges. Bed at six — gruel — tallow
nose — dream of general illumination. March 13th: Mis-
erable' : cold always makes me miserable. 'Receive a letter
from Mrs. Nightin — ' hem !
ROSINA. What did you say, sir?
NIGHTINGALE. Have the nightmare, my dear. (Aside.)
Nearly betrayed myself! (Aloud.) You hear this, and
you talk about capital health to a sufferer like me!
Enter SLAP, at back, dressed as a smug physician.
He appears to be looking about the room.
O! my spirits, my spirits! I wonder what water will do
for them.
442 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
ROSINA. Why, reduce them, of course. Ah, my dear uncle,
I often think I am the cause of your disquietude. I often
think that I ought to marry.
NIGHTINGALE. Very kind of you, indeed, my dear.
Enter GABBLEWIG, with a very large tumbler of water.
O! all right, young man. I had better begin. So you
think that you really ought, my love, — purely on my ac-
count— to marry a Magpie, don't you? (GABBLEWIG
starts and spills water over NIGHTINGALE.) What are you
about ?
GABBLEWIG. I beg pardon, sir. (Aside to ROSINA.) Bless
you!
ROSINA. Ah ! Gab ! — O uncle — don't be frightened — but —
NIGHTINGALE (about to drink, spills water). Return of boot-
jack and strong person! I declare, I'm taking all this
water externally, when I ought to —
SLAP (seizing his hand.) Rash man, forbear! Drain that
chalice, and your life 's not worth a bodkin.
NIGHTINGALE. Dear me, sir ! it 's only water. I 'm merely
a pump patient. (GABBLEWIG and ROSINA speak aside,
hurriedly. )
SLAP. Persevere, and twelve men of Malvern will sit upon
you in less than a week, and, without retiring, bring in a
verdict of 'Found drowned.'
GABBLEWIG (aside to ROSINA). I have my cue, follow me
directly. I '11 bring you another glass, sir, in a quarter
of an hour.
[Exit at door. ROSINA steals after him.
SLAP. A most debilitated pulse — (taking away water) —
great want of coagulum — lymphitic to an alarming de-
gree. Stamina (strikes him gently) weak — decidedly
weak.
NIGHTINGALE. Right ! Always was, sir. In '48, — I think
it was '48 — (Refers.) — Yes, here it is. (Reads.) 'Dys-
peptic. Feel as if kitten at play within me. Try chalk
and pea-flour.'
SLAP. And grow worse.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 443
NIGHTINGALE. Astonishing! I did — yes. (Reads.) — 'Fe-
ver— have head shaved.'
SLAP. And grow worse.
NIGHTINGALE. Amazing ! Sir, you read me like a book. As
there appears to be no dry remedy for my unfortunate
case, I thought I 'd try a wet one ; and here I am, at the
cold water.
SLAP. Water, unless in combination with alcohol, is poison
to you. You want blood. In man there are two kinds
of blood. One in a vessel called a vein, hence venous blood.
- — The other in the vessel called artery ; hence arterial
blood — the one dark, the other bright. Now, sir, . the
the crassamentum of your blood is injured by too much
water. How shall we thicken, sir? (Produce* bottle.)
By mustard and milk.
NIGHTINGALE. Mustard and milk!
SLAP. Mustard and milk, sir. Exhibited with a balsam
known only to myself. (Aside.) Rum! (Aloud.) Sin-
gle bottles, one guinea ; case of twelve, ten pounds.
NIGHTINGALE. Mustard and milk! I don't think I ever
tried — Eh? Yes. (Opens Diary.) 1836; I recollect I
once took — I took— Oh, ah! 'Two quarts of mustard-
seed, fasting.'
SLAP. Pish!
NIGHTINGALE. And you 'd really advise me not to take water?
Enter at door GABBLEWIG and ROSINA, both equipped in
walking-dresses, thick shoes, etc. They keep walking
about during the following.
GABBLEWIG. Who says don't take water? Who says so?
NIGHTINGALE. Why, this gentleman, who is evidently a man
of science.
GABBLEWIG. Pshaw ! Eh, dear. Not take water ! Look at
us — look at us — Mr. and Mrs. Poulter. Six months ago,
I never took water, did I, dear?
ROSINA. Never!
GABBLEWIG. Hated it. Always washed in gin-and-water, and
shaved with spirits of wine. Didn't I, dear?
ROSINA. Always!
444 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
GABBLEWIG. Then what was I? What were we, I may say,
my precious?
ROSINA. You may.
GABBLEWIG. A flabby, dabby couple, like a pair of wet leather
gloves; — no energy — no muscle — no go-ahead. Now you
see what we are; eh, dear? Ten miles before breakfast —
home — gallon of water — ten miles more — gallon of water
and leg of mutton, — ten miles more, — gallon of water — in
fact, we 're never quiet, are we, dear?
ROSINA. Never.
GABBLEWIG. Walk in our sleep — sometimes — can't walk
enough, that 's a fact, eh, dear ?
ROSINA. Yes, dear!
SLAP. Confound this fellow, he '11 spoil all.
NIGHTINGALE. Well, sir, if you really could pull up for a
few minutes, I should be extremely obliged to you.
GABBLEWIG. Here we are, then, — don't keep us long.
(Looks at watch, ROSINA does the same.) — Say a minute,
chronometer time.
NIGHTINGALE. You must know I 'm an invalid.
GABBLEWIG. Five seconds.
NIGHTINGALE. Come down here to try the cold-water cure.
GABBLEWIG. Ten seconds.
NIGHTINGALE. Dear me, sir, I wish you wouldn't keep count-
ing the time in that way ; it increases my nervousness.
GABBLEWIG. Can't help it, sir, — twenty seconds ; — go on, sir.
NIGHTINGALE. Well, sir, this gentleman tells me that my
cranerany —
SLAP. Crass. Crassa-mentum must not be made too sloppy.
NIGHTINGALE. And thereby he advises, sir, —
GABBLEWIG. Forty seconds, — eh, dear? (Show watches to
each other.)
ROSINA. Yes, dear!
NIGHTINGALE. I wish you wouldn't — and that he advises me
to try mustard and milk, sir.
SLAP. In combination with a rare balsam known only to
myself, one guinea a bottle, — case of twelve, ten pounds.
GABBLEWIG. Time's up. (Walks again.) My darling,
mustard and milk? Eh, dear? Don't we know a case of
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 445
mustard and milk, — Captain Blower, late sixteen stone,
now ten and one half, all mustard and milk?
SLAP {aside). Can anybody have tried it?
GABBLEWIG (to NIGHTINGALE). Don't be done! If I see
Blower, I '11 send him to you ; — can't stop longer, can we,
dear? — ten miles and a gallon to do before dinner. Leg
of mutton and a gallon at dinner. Five miles and a wet
sheet after dinner. Come, dear! (They walk out at
door. )
NIGHTINGALE. A very remarkable couple. — What do you
think, now, sir?
SLAP. Think, sir? I think, sir, that any man who professes
to walk ten miles a day, is a humbug, sir; I couldn't do it.
NIGHTINGALE. But then the lady —
SLAP. I grieve to say that I think she 's a humbugess. Those
people, my dear sir, are sent about as cheerful example*
of the effects of cold water. Regularly paid, sir, to way-
lay new comers.
NIGHTINGALE. La! do you think so? do you think there are
people base enough to trade upon human infirmities?
SLAP. Think so? — I know it. There are men base enough
to stand between you (shows bottle) and perfect health
(shakes bottle) who would persuade you that perpetual
juvenility was dear at one pound one a bottle, and that a
green old age of a hundred and twenty was not worth ten
pounds the case. That perambulating water-cart is such
a man !
NIGHTINGALE. Wretch! What an escape I've had. My
dear doctor. You are a doctor?
SLAP. D.D. and M.D., and corresponding member of the
Mendicity Society.
NIGHTINGALE. Mendicity !
SLAP. Medical (what a slip).
NIGHTINGALE. Then I shall be happy to try a bottle to begin
with. (Gives money.)
SLAP. Ah, one bottle. (Gives bottle.) I've confidence m
your case, — you 've none in mine. Ah ! well !
NIGHTINGALE. A case be it then, and I '11 pay the money at
once. Permit me to try a little of the mixture. (Drinks.)
446 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
It 's not very agreeable. I think I '11 make a note in ray
Diary of my first sensations.
Enter at door GABBLEWIG and ROSINA, the former as a
great invalid, the latter as an old nurse.
GABBLEWIG (aside, calling). Rosina, quick, your arm.
(Aloud.) I tell you, Mrs. Trusty, I can't walk any fur-
ther.
ROSINA. Now do try, sir ; we are not a quarter of a mile from
home.
GABBLEWIG. A quarter of a mile ! — why, that 's a day's
journey to a man in my condition.
ROSINA. O dear! what shall I do?
NIGHTINGALE. You seem very ill, sir?
GABBLEWIG. Very, sir. I 'm a snuff, sir, — a mere snuff,
flickering before I go out.
ROSINA. Oh, sir! pray don't die here; try and get home, and
go out comfortably.
GABBLEWIG. Did you ever hear of such inhumanity? and
yet this woman has lived on board wages, at my expense,
for thirty years.
NIGHTINGALE. My dear sir, here 's a very clever friend of
mine who may be of service.
GABBLEWIG. I fear not, — I fear not. I 've tried everything.
SLAP. Perhaps not everything. Pulse very debilitated ; great
want of coagulum; lymphitic to an alarming degree;
stamina weak — decidedly weak.
GABBLEWIG. I don't want you to tell me that, sir.
SLAP. Crassamentum queer — very queer. No hope, but ia
mustard and milk.
GABBLEWIG (starting up). Mustard and milk!
ROSINA. Mustard and milk!
SLAP (aside). Is this Captain Blower?
GABBLEWIG (to NIGHTINGALE). Are you, too, a victim?
Have you swallowed any of that man-slaughtering com-
pound?
NIGHTINGALE (alarmed). Only a little, — a very little.
GABBLEWIG. How do you feel? Dimness of sight, — feeble-
ness of limbs?
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 447
NIGHTINGALE (alarmed). Not at present.
GABBLEWIG. But you will, sir,— you will. You'd never
think I once rivalled that person, in rotundity.
NIGHTINGALE. Never.
ROSINA. But he '11 never do it again ; he '11 never do it again.
GABBLEWIG. You 'd never think that Madame Tussaud
wanted to model my leg, and announce it as an Extraor-
dinary addition.
NIGHTINGALE. I certainly should not have thought it.
GABBLEWIG. She might now put it in the Chamber of Hor-
rors. Look at it!
ROSINA. It 's nothing at all out of the flannel, sir.
GABBLEWIG. All mustard and milk, sir. I 'm nothing but
mustard and milk!
NIGHTINGALE (seizes SLAP). You scoundrel! and to this state
you would have reduced me.
SLAP. O, this is some trick, sir, some cheat of the water-
doctors.
NIGHTINGALE. Why, you won't tell me that he's intended
as a cheerful example of the effects of cold water?
SLAP. I never said he was, — he 's one of the failures ; but as
two of a trade can never agree, I '11 go somewhere else
and spend your guinea. [Exit.
GABBLEWIG (m his own voice). What a brazen knave! Sec-
ond knockdown blow to Gabblewig. Betting even. Any-
body's battle. Gabblewig came up smiling and at him
again.
NIGHTINGALE (goes to GABBLEWIG). My dear sir, what do
I not owe you? (Shakes his hand.)
GABBLEWIG. O, don't do that, sir, I shall tumble to pieces
like a fantoccini figure if you do. I am only hung to-
gether by threads.
NIGHTINGALE. But let me know the name of my preserver,
that I may enter it in my Diary.
GABBLEWIG. Captain Blower, R.N. (NIGHTINGALE writes.)
I 'm happy to have rescued you from that quack. I de-
clare the excitement has done me good. Rosi — Mrs.
Trusty, I think I can walk now.
ROSINA. That 's right, sir. Lean upon me.
448 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
GABBLEWIG. Oh! Oh!
NIGHTINGALE. What 's the matter, Captain Blower?
GABBLEWIG. That 's the milk, sir. Oh !
NIGHTINGALE. Dear me, Captain Blower !
GABBLEWIG. And that 's the mustard, sir.
[Exeunt at door GABBLEWIG and ROSINA.
NIGHTINGALE. Really, this will be the most eventful day in
my Diary, except one, — that day which consigned me to
Mrs. Nightingale and twenty years of misery. I 've not
seen her for nineteen; though I have periodical reminders
that she is still in the land of the living, in the shape of
quarterly payments of twenty-five pounds, clear of income-
tax. Well ! I 'm used to it ; and so that I never see her
face again, I 'm content. I '11 go find Rosina, and tell
her what has happened. Quite an escape, I declare.
[Exit, L,
Enter at door SUSAN, in bonnet, etc.
SUSAN. What a wicked world this is, to be sure ! Everybody
seems trying to do the best they can for themselves, and
what makes it worse, the complaint seems to be catching;
for I 'm sure I can't help telling Mr. Gabblewig what a
traitor that Tip is. I hope Mr. G. won't come in my way,
and tempt me. Ah ! here he is, and I 'm sure I shall fall.
Enter GABBLEWIG.
GABBLEWIG. Well, Susan, have you got the certificate?
SUSAN. No, sir, but uncle has, and he '11 be here directly.
Oh, sir, if you knew what I 've heard !
GABBLEWIG. What?
SUSAN. I'm sure you'd give half-a-sovereign to hear; I'm
sure you would.
GABBLEWIG. I 'm sure I should, and there 's the money.
SUSAN. Well, sir, your man Tip 's a traitor, sir, a conspirator,
sir. I overheard him and another planning some decep-
tion. I couldn't quite make out what, but I know it 's
something to deceive Mr. Nightingale.
GABBLEWIG. Find out with all speed what this scheme is about,
and let me know. What 's that mountain in petticoats ?
Slap, or I 'm not Gabblewig !
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 449
SUSAN. And with him Tip, or I 'm not Susan !
GABBLEWIG. Another flash ! I guess it all ! Susan, your
mistress shall instruct you what to do. Vanish, sweet
spirit! [Exeunt GABBLEWIG, R., and SUSAN, L.
Enter at door, R., SLAP in female attire. Looks about
cautiously.
SLAP. I hope he 's not gone out. I 've a presentiment that
my good luck is deserting me ; but before we do part com-
pany, I '11 make a bold dash, and secure something to carry
on with. Now, Calomel — I mean Mercury, — befriend me.
(Rings.)
Enter LITHERS, L.
LITHERS. Did you ring, ma'am?
SLAP. Yes, young man; I wish to speak with a Mr. Night'
ingale, an elderly gent, who arrived this morning.
LITHERS. What name, ma'am?
SLAP. Name no consequence; say I come from M'ria.
LITHERS. M'ria?
SLAP. M'ria, a mutual friend of mine and Mr. Nightingale,
and one he ought not to be ashamed of.
LITHERS. Yes, ma'am. (Aside.) Mr. Gabblewig's right.
[Exit.
SLAP. M'ria has been dead these twelve years, during which
time my victim has paid her allowance with commendable
regularity to me, her only surviving brother. Ah, I
thought that name was irresistible, and here he is.
Enter NIGHTINGALE, L., closing door at back.
His trepidation is cheering. He'll bleed freely; what a
lamb it is! (Curtseys as NIGHTINGALE comes down.)
Your servant, sir.
NIGHTINGALE. Now don't lose a moment; you say you come
from Maria: what Maria?
SLAP. Your Maria.
NIGHTINGALE. I am sorry to acknowledge the responsibility.
SLAP. Ah, sir; that poor creature's much changed, sir.
NIGHTINGALE. For the worse, of course?
450 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
SLAP. I 'm afraid so. No gin now, sir.
NIGHTINGALE. Then it 's brandy.
SLAP. Lives on it, sir, and breaks more windows than ever.
She 's heard that you 've come down here.
NIGHTINGALE. So I suppose, by this visit.
SLAP. She lives about a mile from Malvern.
NIGHTINGALE (starts). What! I thought she was down in
Yorkshire.
SLAP. Was and is is two different things. She wanted for
to come and see you. •
NIGHTINGALE. If she does, I '11 stop her allowance.
SLAP. And have her call every day? M'ria 's my friend, —
but I know that wouldn't be pleasant. She 'd a proposal
to make, so, M'ria, says I, — I '11 see your lawful husband,
— as you is, sir, and propose for you.
NIGHTINGALE. I '11 listen to nothing.
SLAP. Not if it puts the sad sea-waves between you and M'ri*.
for ever?
NIGHTINGALE (interested). Eh!
SLAP. You know she 'd a brother, an excellent young man,
who went to America ten years ago.
NIGHTINGALE (takes out Diary). I know. (Reads aside.}
'16th of May 1841, sent fifty pounds to Mrs. N.'s vaga-
bond brother, going to America — qy. to the devil?'
SLAP. He has written to M'ria to say that if you '11 give her
two hundred pounds, and she '11 come out, he '11 take care
of her for ever.
NIGHTINGALE. Done ! — it 's a bargain.
SLAP. He bites! — and her son for a hundred more.
NIGHTINGALE. What son?
SLAP. Ah, sir ! you don't know your blessings. Shortly after
you and M'ria separated, a son was born; but M'ria, to
revenge herself — which was wrong; oh, it was wrong in
her, that was, — never let you know it ; but sent him to the
Workus, as a fondling she had received in a basket.
NIGHTINGALE. I don't believe a word of it.
SLAP. She said you wouldn't. But seeing is believing, and
so I 've brought the innocent along with me. I 've got
the Pretty, here.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 451
NIGHTINGALE. Here! in your pocket?
SLAP. No — at the door. (They rise.)
NIGHTINGALE. At the door!
SLAP. Come in, Christopher! Named after you, sir! for in
spite of M'ria's feelings, you divided her heart with Old
Tom.
Enter at door TIP as a Charity Boy.
NIGHTINGALE. O nonsense!
SLAP. Christopher, behold your Par. (Boxes Mm.) What
do you stand there for like a eight-day clock or a idol, as
if Pars were found every day ?
TIP (aside). Don't; you make me nervous. (Aloud.) And
is that my Par!
SLAP. Yes, child. Me, who took you from the month, can
vouch for it.
TIP. O Par !
NIGHTINGALE. Keep off, you young yellow-hammer ; or I '11
knock you down. Hark 'ee, ma'am. If you can assure
me of the departure of your friend and this cub, I will
give you the money! For twenty years I have been
haunted by —
Enter GABBLEWIG at door, disguised as Old Woman.
GABBLEWIG. Which the blessed innocent has been invaygled
of, and man-trapped, — leastways boy-trapped ; — and never
no more will I leave this 'ouse until I find a parent's 'ope —
a mother's pride — and nobody's (as I 'm aweer on) joy.
NIGHTINGALE and SUSAN place Chair.
SLAP (aside). What on earth is this! Who is a mother's
pride and nobody's joy? (To Tip.) You don't mean
to say you are?
TIP (solemnly). I 'm a horphan. (Goes up to GABBLEWIG.)
What are you talking about, you old Bedlam?
GABBLEWIG. Oh! (screaming and throwing her arms about
his neck) — my 'ope — my pride — my son !
TIP (struggling). Your son!
GABBLEWIG (aside to him). If you don't own me for your
452 MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
mother, you villain, on the spot, I '11 break every bone in
your skin, and have your skin prepared afterwards by the
Bermondsey tanners.
TIP (aside). My master! — My mother! (They embrace.)
SLAP. Are you mad? Am I mad? Are we all mad? (To
TIP.) Didn't you tell me that whatever I said —
TIP. You said? What is your voice to the voice of Natur?
(Embraces Ms master again.)
SLAP. Natur! Natur! ah-h-h! (Screams. Chair brought.)
O you unnat'ral monster! Who see your first tooth dawn
on a deceitful world? Who watched you running alone
in a go-cart, and tipping over on your precious head upon
the paving-stones in the confidence of childhood? Who
give you the medicine that reduced you when you was
sick, and made you so when you wasn't?
GABBLEWIG (rising). Who? Me!
SLAP. You, ma'am?
GABBLEWIG. Me, ma'am, as is well beknown to all the country
round, which the name of this sweetest of babbies as was
giv to his own joyful self when blest in best Whitechapel
mixed upon a pincusheon, and mother saved likewise was
Absolom. Arter his own parential father, as never (other-
wise than through being bad in liquor) lost a day's work
in the wheel-wright business, which it was but limited, Mr.
Nightingale, being wheels of donkey shays and goats, and
one was even drawed by geese for a wager, and went right
into the centre aisle of the parish church on a Sunday
morning on account of the obstinacy of the animals, as
can be certified by Mr. Wigs the beadle afore he died of
drawing on his Wellington boots, to which he was not
accustomed, arter a hearty meal of beef and walnuts, to
which he was too parshal, and in the marble fountain of
that church this preciousest of infants was made Absolom,
which never can be unmade no more, I am proud to say,
to please or give offence to no one nowheres and nohows.
SLAP. Would you forswear your blessed mother, M'ria
Nightingale, lawful wedded wife of this excellent old gent?
Why don't the voice o' Natur claim its par?
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 453
NIGHTINGALE. O, don't make me a consideration on any
account !
GABBLEWIG. M'ria Nightingale, which affliction sore long
time she bore —
NIGHTINGALE. And so did I.
GABBLEWIG. Physicians was in vain, — which she never had
none partickler as I knows of, exceptin one which she tore
his hair by handfuls out in consequence of differences of
opinion relative to her complaint, but it was wrote upon
her tombstone ten year and more ago, and dead she is as
the hosts of the Egyptian Fairies.
NIGHTINGALE. Dead ! Prove it, and I '11 give you fifty
pounds.
SLAP. Prove it! I defies her. (Aside.) I'm done.
GABBLEWIG. Prove it! — which I can and will, directly minit,
by my brother the sexton, as I will here produce in the
twinkling of a star or human eye. (Aside.) From this
period of the contest Gabblewig had it all his own way,
and went in and won. No money was laid out, at any
price, on Formiville. Fifty to one on Gabblewig freely
offered, and no takers. [Exit at door.
SLAP (aside.) I don't like this, — so exit Slap!
NIGHTINGALE (seizing him). No, ma'am, you don't leave
this place till the mystery is cleared up.
SLAP. Unhand me, monster! I claims my habeas corpus.
(Breaks from him. NIGHTINGALE goes to the door and
prepares to defend the pass with a chair.) (To TIP.)
As for you, traitor, though I 'm not pugnacious, I '11 give
you a lesson in the art of self-defence you shall remember
as long as you live.
TIP. You! the bottle imp as has been my ruin! Reduce
yourself to my weight, and I '11 fight you for a pound.
(Squares.)
GABBLEWIG (without). I '11 soon satisfy the gentleman.
SLAP. Then I 'm done ! very much done ! I see nothing be-
fore me but premature incarceration, and an old age of
gruel.
MR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY
Enter GABBLEWIG at door at Sexton.
NIGHTINGALE. He 's very old ! My invaluable centenarian,
will you allow me to inquire —
SEXTON. I don't hear you.
NIGHTINGALE. He's very deaf. (Aloud.) Will you allow
me to inquire —
SEXTON. It 's no use whispering to me, sir, I 'm hard o' hear-
ing.
NIGHTINGALE. He 's very provoking. (Louder.) Whether
you ever buried —
SEXTON. Brewed? Yes, yes, I brewed — that is, me and my
wife, as has been dead and gone now this forty year, next
hop-picking — (my wife was a Kentish woman) — we
brewed, especially one year, the strongest beer ever you
drunk. It was called in our country Samson with his hair
on — alluding to its great strength, you understand, — and
my wife, she said —
NIGHTINGALE (very loud). Buried — not brewed!
SEXTON. Buried? O, ah! Yes, yes. Buried a many.
They was strong, too, — once.
NIGHTINGALE. Did you ever bury a Mrs. Nightingale?
SEXTON. Ever bury a Nightingale? No, no, only Chris-
tians.
NIGHTINGALE (in his ear). Missis — Mis-sis Nightingale?
SEXTON. O yes, yes. Buried her — rather a fine woman, —
married (as the folks told me) an uncommon ugly man.
Yes, yes. Used to live here. Here (taking out pocket-
book) is the certificate of her burial. (Gives it.) I got it
for my sister. O yes ! Buried her. I thought you
meant a Nightingale. Ha, ha, ha!
NIGHTINGALE. My dear friend, there 's a guinea, and it 's
cheap for the money. (Gives it.)
SEXTON. I thank 'ee, sir, I thank *ee. (Aside.) Formiville
heavily grassed, and a thousand to one on Gabblewig!
[Exit at door.
NIGHTINGALE (after reading certificate). You — you — inex-
pressible swindler. If you were not a woman, I 'd have
you ducked in the horse-pond.
TIP (on his knees). O, sir, do it. He deserves it.
JMR. NIGHTINGALE'S DIARY 455
NIGHTINGALE. He?
TIP. Yes, sir, she 's a he. He deluded me with a glass of
rum-and-water ; and the promise of a five-pound note.
NIGHTINGALE. You scoundrel!
SLAP. Sir, you are welcome to your own opinion. I am not
the first man who has failed in a great endeavour. Na-
poleon had his Waterloo, — Slap has his Malvern. Hence-
forth, I am nobody. The eagle retires to his rock.
Enter GABBLEWIG in his own dress.
GABBLEWIG. You had better stop here. Be content with
plain Slap, — discard counterfeit Formiville, — and we '11 do
something for you.
SLAP. Mr. Gabblewig! [Exit at door.
GABBLEWIG. Charley Bit, Mr. Poulter, Captain Blower, re-
spectable female, and deaf sexton, all equally at anybody's
service.
NIGHTINGALE. What do I hear?
GABBLEWIG. Me.
NIGHTINGALE. And what do I see?
ROSINA (entering at door). Me! Dear uncle, you would
have been imposed upon and plundered, and made even
worse than you ever made yourself, but for —
GABBLEWIG. Me. My dear Mr. Nightingale, you did think
I could do nothing but talk. If you now think I can
act — a little — let me come out in a new character. (Em-
bracing ROSINA.) Will you?
NIGHTINGALE. Will I? Take her, Mr. Gabblewig. Stop,
though. Ought I to give away what has made me so
unhappy. Memorandum — Mrs. Nightingale — see Diary.
(Takes out book.)
GABBLEWIG. Stop, sir! Don't look! Burn that book, and
be happy! — (Brings on SLAP at door.) — Ask your doctor.
What do you say, Mustard and Milk?
SLAP. I say, sir, try me; and when you find I am not worth
a trial, don't try me any more. As to that gentleman's
destroying his Diary, sir, my opinion is that he might per-
haps refer to it once again.
GABBLEWIG (to audience). Shall he refer to it once more?
(To NIGHTINGALE.) Well, I think you may.
THE END
NO THOROUGHFARE
A DRAMA
IN FIVE ACTS AND
A PROLOGUE
[1867]
BY CHARLES DICKENS AND
WILKIE COLLINS
458
NO THOROUGHFARE
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Ax NEW ROYAL ADELPHI THEATRE, DECEMBER 26, 1867
VEILED LADY ....
SARAH (otherwise SALLY) GOLD-
STRAW ....
LITTLE WALTER WILDING . .•
FIRST HUSBAND ....
SECOND HUSBAND ,. - »• r
FIRST WIFE . ' •*, ' »•• "• '."*
SECOND WIFE . . . .
MR. WALTER WILDING
MR. BINTRY (a man of law")
JOEY LADLE (head cellerman)
GEORGE VENDALE
JULES OBENREIZER
MARGUERITE ....
MADAME DOR . . ; Ti
JEAN MARIE (a guide) .
JEAN PAUL (ditto) V./'
FATHER FRANCIS r./.
MONKS
MRS. BlLLINGTON.
MRS. ALFRED MELLON.
MASTER SIDNEY.
MR. R. ROMER.
MR. PRITCHARD.
MRS. STOKER.
MRS. D'ESTE.
MR. BILLINGTON.
MR. G. BELMORE.
MR. BENJAMIN WEBSTER.
MR. H. G. NEVILLE.
MR. FECHTER.
Miss CARLOTTA LECLERCQ.
MRS. A. LEWIS.
MR. C. F. SMITH.
MR. BRANSCOMBE.
MR. R. PHILLIPS.
MR. ALDRIDGE.
MR. TOMLINSON.
Time of playing. — Three hours and forty minutes.
Music. — A 'mysterious' theme always to OBENREIZER'S en-
trances. Melodrama music to Scene 1st, Act 4th, on and after
OBENREIZER'S entrance with knife.
REMARKS. — Except VENDALE and JOEY, all pronounce 'Oben-
reizer' in the English manner, that is 'Oben-righ-sir.' JOEY
calls him 'Open-razor/ and VENDALE gives it the Swiss or Ger-
man pronunciation, 'Oben-right-zer.'
STAGE DIRECTIONS. — R. means Right of Stage, facing the
Audience; L. Left; C. Centre; R. C. Right of Centre; L. C. Left
of centre. D. F. Door in the Flat, or Scene running across the
back of the Stage; C. D. F. Centre Door in the Flat; R. D. F.
Right Door in the Flat; L. D. F. Left Door in the Flat; R. D.
NO THOROUGHFARE 459
Eight Door; L. D. Left Door; 1 E. First Entrance; 2 E. Second
Entrance; U. E. Upper Entrance; 1, 2, or 3 G. First, Second
or Third Groove.
COSTUMES (MODERN).
OBENREIZER. — Act 1st: Black hat, black neck-tie, long-skirted
black frock-coat, light pants, dark vest, hair rather long
behind, cane. Act 2nd, Scene 1st: Black suit, coat is short-
skirted; Scene 3rd: Same, with hat and gloves. Act 3rd,
Scene 1st: Same, with hat and gloves; Scene 3rd: Travel-*
ling dress; round, black Astracan cap, russet waistcoat with
some of the breast buttons left unbuttoned, showing white
vest under, wallet with strap, watch. Act 4th, Scene 1st:
Same as last, with pants tucked into top of boots; 2nd en-
trance, in waistcoat, with sleeves drawn tight, collar open;
Scene 2nd and 3rd: Same a* 1st entrance; Scene 1st: Well
buttoned up, thick gloves. Act 5th: Russet waistcoat, black
pants in high boots, black coat, snuff-box.
GEORGE VENDALE. — Act 1st: Suit of grey mixture, cut-away
coat, black low-crowned hard felt hat, watch and chain.
Act 2nd, Scene 1st and 2nd: Grey pants, black high hat,
black coat, white vest, jewels in case, to bring on with him.
Act 3rd, Scene 1st: Black suit; Scene 3rd: Dark grey pants,
black coat and vest, hat. Act 4th, Scene 1st; Same; Scenes
2nd and 3rd: Pants in high russet boots, tall black felt hat,
black overcoat buttoned up to neck, thick gloves. Act 5th:
Same as last, but without hat, gloves and overcoat.
MR. BINTRY. — Black suit, with brown overcoat in Act 5th. Griz-
zled wig and iron-grey side whiskers, white stand-up collar
and cravat, black gloves.
WALTER WILDING. — Black suit, except grey pants; light hair and
fair complexion; an habitual action of putting his hand to
his head when pausing for a word.
JOEY LADLE. — Act 1st and 2nd: Black hair, bald on top of head
and forehead, small black side whiskers; dark suit of velve-
teen; leather apron, much wrinkled and stained, from hit
neck to mid-leg, with collar-strap and waist-string; small
skull-cap of oil-skin; slow in speech and thick in compre-
hension. Made up stout. Act 3rd, Scene 1st: Same; Scene
3rd: Same without arpon; coat on. Act 4th, Scene 3rd:
Muffler round neck, black overcoat and cap; black gloves.
460 NO THOROUGHFARE
legs bandaged in the Italian brigand stylo. Act 5th: Same
a-s last.
LANDLORD. — As a Swiss peasant; grey stockings, blue breeches,
banded vest, in red and blue, embroidered; black felt hat.
GUIDES. — Felt hats, pinned up with crosses; long cloaks, sheep-
skin jackets, high boots, alpenstocks (pine poles six feet
long, with iron at end).
FIRST AND SECOND HUSBAND in Scene 2nd, Prologue: Ordinary
walking dresses. The FIRST is a man of fifty; the SECOND
a young man of twenty-five. Hats and gloves.
FATHER FRANCIS, A MONK. — Russet gown, sandals; tonsure on
black wig; black beard.
A MONK. — Like FATHER FRANCIS.
LITTLE WALTER WILDING. — In dark blue jacket and pants; fair-
haired and fair complexion.
FOUNDLING BOYS. — A number, about twelve years old, in blue
suits.
Two MEN. — To bring in flowers, Act 2nd, Scene 1st: Ordinary
dress, coats and caps.
MARGUERITE. — Act 1st: Straw hat, with red and blue ribbons;
blue dress, with bodice cut square and low, in Swiss fashion;
gilt buckle to waist-belt, buckles to shoes; light hair, braided;
ear-rings, and cross at neck. Acts 2nd and 3rd: House
dress, dark colour, Swiss waist. Act 4th: Plain dress, with
mantle of same, with hood; hair braided. Act 5th: Blue
dress, with four inches deep black border at bottom hem;
black jacket, with gilt buttons.
VEILED LADY. — Black dress, black bonnet, with long black veil;
face pale.
SALLY GOLDSTRAW. — Prologue, Scene 1st: Black dress, shawl and
bonnet; Scene 2nd: Same dress, white cuffs and collar;
apron. Act 1st: White bonnet, with fancy ribbons; shawl,
plain dress. Act 2nd: Dark dress, black apron. Act 4th:
In black.
FIRST WIFE. — A woman of forty; grey hair, slightly empurpled
face; shawl and bonnet trimmed gaily; coloured dress.
SECOND WIFE. — Walking dress, bonnet and mantle.
MADAME DOR. — Act 1st: Bonnet, dark dress, with black 'lace
square'; she is made up stout, with her hair frizzled out on
each side of face, to make it seem broader. Act 2nd : House
dress, hair as before; she walks side wise, keeping her face
from the other performers when crossing stage or making an
exit.
NO THOROUGHFARE 461
Two GIRLS (for the Hospital).— Prologue, Scene 1st: Dark
dresses, bonnets and mantles; Scene 2nd: Neat brown,
dresses, white cuffs, collars, aprons and caps.
PROPERTIES
Prologue, Scene 1st: Small wad of paper, as of two coins in it,
for VEILED LADY; Scene 2nd: Two large platters, with roast
meat on them, for tables — L. 1 and 2 E. ; carving-knives and
forks to them, and spoons; knives, forks and plates for
the boys ; cloth, castors, cruets, etc., to set table ; on L. 1 and
2 E., c. on F. and R. 1 E. set, framed placards, headed
'Patrons, 1760/ etc. Act 1st, Scene 1st: Wine-baskets,
boxes and casks to make picture of stage; a hackney-coach,
to hold two persons, to cross L. u. E. to D. c. in wall set' on
four grooves; eye-glasses for BINTRY; candle to burn, held
in the end of a cleft stick, two feet long; a large cask and
two small ones, to serve as table and chairs; bottle and two
glasses; umbrella for BINTRY; an odd glove for MADAME
DOR to be rubbing with cloth. Act 2nd, Scene 1st: Two
books on table, R. c. front; stockings and ball of worsted
for MADAME DOR; jewels in case for VENDALE, needlework
for MARGUERITE ; two large handsome gilt flower-stands with
flowers, to be brought on D. in p.; jewels in case for OBEN-
REIZER; Scene 3rd: A long rod; three candles to burn at
end of cleft sticks; a starting-mallet, tasting-rod and tin
measures laid on barrels; a small cask placed R. c.; cobweb
to fall. Act 3rd, Scene 1st: Writing materials on desk up
L. ; three letters, strong box in flat, R. to E. ; framed calendar
over mantelpiece; straw L. side, about the painted set of
open wine-box, two bottles for same; quill to be worn by
VENDALE behind his ear; Scene 2nd: Small basket for
SALLY; Scene 3rd: Long pipe for OBENRKIZER; small travel-
ling-trunk, pen and ink on R. table; flat writing-case. Act
4th, Scene 1st: Pipe as before for OBENREIZER; box of
matches, candle to burn; red fire in fireplace, bottle and two
glasses; writing-case of Scene 3rd, Act 3rd; knife for OBEN-
REIZER; Scene 2nd: Two alpenstocks (pine poles six feet
long, tipped with iron hook) ; leather case, with strap, to go
over shoulders, for OBENREIZER; Scene 3rd: The two alpen-
stocks. Act 5th, Scene 1st: A large brass-clasped Bible
and bag of money for FATHER FRANCIS; snuff-box for
462 NO THOROUGHFARE
OBENREIZER; in clock-safe, two packets of papers on upper
shelf, three on lower; bell to strike eight; legal paper for
BINTRY; small vial for OBENREIZER; pen and ink, lighted
candle on table R.
NO THOROUGHFARE
PROLOGUE
SCENE I. — Gas down — VEILED LADY enters L. to c., pauses,
then to -R., by gate in F. — Two Girls enter by gate m F.,
draw their shawls closer around them, cross and exeunt
L. — VEILED LADY follows them to c., looking at their
faces, shakes her head, stops, returns to gate. — SALLY
GOLDSTKAW enters by gate, crosses to exit L., but VEILED
LADY overtakes her and stops her, c.
SALLY. What do you want of me?
VEILED LADY. I wish to speak with you. I must speak with
^
SALLY. What is it you want?
VEILED LADY. You are called Sally Goldstraw, you are one
of the nurses at the hospital, and I must speak with you.
SALLY. You seem to know all about me, ma'am. May I
make so bold as to ask who you are?
VEILED LADY. Come, look at me under this lamp (to gate,
removing veil).
SALLY (shakes head). No, ma'am (replaces the LADY'S veil),
I don't know you ; I never saw you before this night.
VEILED LADY. Do I look like a happy woman?
SALLY. No ! you look as if you had something on your mind.
VEILED LADY. I have something on my mind, Sally! I am
one of those miserable mothers who have never known
what happy motherhood is ! My child is one of those poor
children in this foundling hospital, put there when a boy,
and I have never seen him!
SALLY. O dear, dear, dear ! what can I say, what can I do ?
VEILED LADY. Carry your memory back twelve years. The
day when you entered the foundling must have been a
memorable one !
SALLY. It was. But twelve years is a long time.'
463
464 NO THOROUGHFARE
[PROLOGUE
VEILED LADY. If it is long to you, think how long it must be
to me! I have paid the penalty of my disgrace! My
family forced me to live in a foreign land ever since. But
now I find myself released, — free to come back. Sally
Goldstraw, I have come back. It lies in your power to
make me a happy woman !
SALLY. Me! and how can I do that?
VEILED LADY. Here are two guineas in this paper. (Offers
rott of paper.) Take my poor little present, and I will
tell you.
SALLY (repulses paper). You may know my face, but not
my nature, ma'am. There is not a child in all the house
that I belong to, who has not a good word for Sally.
Could I be so well thought of if I was to be bought?
VEILED LADY. I did not mean to buy you; I meant only to
reward you very slightly.
SALLY. I want no reward. If there is anything I can do
for you, ma'am, that I will do for its own sake. You are
much mistaken in me if you think that I will do it for
money. What is it you want?
VEILED LADY. The day when you entered the foundling hos-
pital must be a marked day in your life?
SALLY. It is a marked day!
VEILED LADY. You must remember what passed on that day?
SALLY. Everything!
VEILED LADY. Then you remember a child that was received
in your care?
SALLY. I do remember the child.
VEILED LADY (eagerly). That child is still living?
SALLY. Living and hearty!
VEILED LADY (clasps hands). Thank heaven! You still take
care of him?
SALLY. Oh, let me go. I am doing wrong to listen to you!
(Crosses to L. c., detamed by VEILED LADY.)
VEILED LADY. What of the child?
SALLY. He — he is still here. He was still here when I came
back from our country establishment to learn the ways of
the place.
VEILED LADY. I, too, have learnt the ways of the place.
NO THOROUGHFARE 465
SC. II ]
They have given my child a name — a Christian name and
a surname? Tell me, what have they called him?
SALLY. Oh, you mustn't ask me! indeed, you must not!
(to L.).
VEILED LADY. His Christian name! You must tell me! I
am his mother! Come back, come back! (c.) You may
some day be a mother! As you hope to be a happy wife,
as you are a living, loving woman ! tell me the name of my
child (detaining SALLY by shawl).
SALLY. Don't! please don't! you are trying to make me do
wrong !
VEILED LADY. The surname and the Christian name, Sally!
(clinging to SALLY).
SALLY. Oh, don't, don't kneel to me !
VEILED LADY. His name, Sally, his name!
SALLY. You promise —
VEILED LADY. Anything!
SALLY. Put your two hands in mine (LADY does so) and
promise that you will not ask me to tell you anything but
the surname and the Christian name!
VEILED LADY. I promise!
SALLY (putting her lips dose to her face). Walter Wilding!
VEILED LADY. Walter Wilding! (sob) kiss him for me!
(Exit SALLY, hiding her face, L.) Oh! (sobbing, goes
along flat to E.) Oh! [Exit, sobbing, R.
SCENE II. — Gas up — FIRST and SECOND HUSBANDS and
WIVES discovered L. c., the two Girls, L., at table carv-
ing— Boys enter, R. u. E., and sing 'God Save the
Queen.5 l They take seats. VEILED LADY enters,
E. u. E. to L. c., down stage, earnestly regarding the
Boys.
FIRST WIFE. Mr. Jones, whatever made you bring me here?
FIRST HUSBAND. Why, my dear, you wanted to come !
FIRST WIFE. How dare you tell me that I wanted to come?
FIRST HUSBAND. You did! to see the pretty children-
FIRST WIFE. I— I— I ! The man who would bring his wife
,- i Or any school devotional hymn.
466 NO THOROUGHFARE
[PROLOGUE
to see these examples of vice is lost to the commonest sense
of decency. I blush for human nature!
FIRST HUSBAND. Human nature is very much obliged to you,
my dear.
FIRST WLFE. Ugh! give me your arm, Mr. Jones! you are
a fool.
FIRST HUSBAND. When I married you, that left no doubt of
it! (to R., proscenium E., with FIRST WIFE) but you had
better keep that opinion to yourself.
[Exit R., pros. E.
SECOND WIFE. Oh, I should like to kiss these dear boys.
SECOND HUSBAND. Kiss them! Think of your own boys at
home.
SECOND WIFE. It is sad to think that none of them have ever
known a mother's love, or sat on a father's knee! It is a
noble charity.
SECOND HUSBAND. A noble charity indeed! I have counted
more than forty boys in this room, and every one of them
is as well-kept and fat as our Tom!
[Leads WIFE off R., proscenium E.
SALLY (to VEILED LADY). Didn't you faithfully promise
you would not ask me to say anything more? (L. c.
front.)
VEILED LADY. I told you I would not ask you to say more,
but point me him out, dear Sally, good Sally !
SALLY (aside). Oh! I am going to do wrong again!
VEILED LADY. My heart is breaking ! to know that my boy is
here, but I can't tell which he is !
SALLY. You must not speak so loud here! Be patient a
moment. I am going to walk round the table. Follow
me with your eyes. The boy that I stop at and speak to
will not be the one. But the boy that I touch will be
Walter Wilding. (VEILED LADY nods. SALLY goes up
to R. u. E. corner, around table, comes down R. side of\
table, and bends over the SECOND BOY to speak to him,
resting her right hand on the left shoulder of WILDING,
the FIRST BOY at front end. After seeming to speak, pats
WILDING'S shoulder, looks over at VEILED LADY, turns
and goes off R., proscenium E.)
ACT ^ NO THOROUGHFARE 467
VEILED LADY. Ah! (slowly to head of table, to WILDING.)
How old are you, my boy?
WILDING. I am twelve.
VEILED LADY. Ah! Are you well and happy?
WILDING. Yes, ma'am.
VEILED LADY. Would you like to be provided for and be
your own master when you grow up?
WILDING. Yes, ma'am !
VEILED LADY (with grouting emotion). Would you like to
have a home of your own and a mother who loves vou?
(Sob.)
WILDING. Oh, yes, ma'am!
(VEILED LADY embraces him gobbing. — All the Boys rise
and sing 'God save the Queen.')
WILDING — VEILED LADY.
c., at head of table.
Boys at table. The two Girls.
a. to c. L.
CURTAIN
ACT I
SCENE. — Court-yard m Wine Merchant's discovering WAL-
TER WILDING and MR. BINTRY seated at cash table,
R. c., front — two men carry cases from L. u. E. off K. 2 E.
WILDING. I don't know how it may appear to you, Mr. Bin-
try, but what with the emotion, and what with the heat
of the weather, I feel that old singing in the head, and
buzzing in my ears.
BINTRY. A little repose will refresh you, Mr. Wilding.
WILDING. How do you like the forty-five years' old port?
BINTRY. How do I like it? la lawyer! Did you ever hear
of a lawyer who did not like port? Capital wine! much
too good to be given away — even to lawyers!
WILDING. And now to my affairs. I think we have got
everything straight, Mr. Bintry? (BINTRY nods.) A
partner secured?
468 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT i
BINTRY (nods). Partner secured. (Drinks.)
WILDING. A housekeeper advertised for?
BINTRY (nods). A housekeeper advertised for, to 'apply per-
sonally at Cripple Corner, Great Tower Street, from ten
to twelve.'
WELDING. My late dear mother's affairs wound up — and all
charges paid?
BINTRY (chuckling and slapping his vest pockets lightly).
All charges paid, without an item being taxed! the most
unprofessional thing I ever heard of in all my career.
(Looks R. 1 E.) Dear me! you have her portrait there?
WILDING. My mother's. One I have in my own room — the
other there in my counting-house in full view. Ah! it
seems but yesterday when she came to the Foundling to
give me a home, and ask me if I could love her. Oh, you
(her lawyer) know how I loved her! And now that I can
love her no more, I honour and revere her memory. The
utmost love was cherished between us, and we never were
separated till death took her from me six months ago.
Everything I have I owe to her. I hope my love for her
repaid her. She had been deeply deceived, Mr. Bintry,
and had cruelly suffered. But she never spoke of that —
she never betrayed her betrayer !
BINTRY (drinking). She had made up her mind, and she
could hold her peace. (Aside.) A devilish deal more than
you ever can !
WILDING. I am not ashamed of her! I mean, not ashamed of
being a foundling. I never knew a father, but I can be a
father to all in my employment. I hope my new partner
will second my desire, and that the housekeeper will help
me, my people living in the same house, and eating at the
same table with me.
JOEY enters from cellar door, L. 2 E., with candle m stick
which he puts L. on barrel, comes down c.
JOEY. Respecting this same boarding and lodging, (cap in
hand) young Master Wilding?
BINTRY. Ah, ha! This is one of your new family! That
boy in a leather pinafore won't cost much in washing.
NO THOROUGHFARE 469
ACT ij
WILDING. Yes, Joey? (interrogatively).
JOEY. If you wish to board and lodge me, take me. I can
peck as well as most men. Where I pecks ain't so high a
h'objeck as what I peck, nor even so high a h'objeck as
how much I peck.
BINTRY. Master Joey, you ought to have been a lawyer.
Where we peck is not so high an object as what we peck
and how much we peck ! Human nature is much the same
in all professions. Mr. Wilding, I '11 try another glass
of the forty -five.
JOEY. Is it all to live in the house, young Master Wilding?
The two other cellarmen, the three porters, the two 'pren-
tices, and the odd men?
WILDING. Yes, Joey, I hope we shall be a united family.
JOEY. Ah, I hope they may be.
WILDING. They? Rather say we, Joey!
JOEY. Don't look to me to make jolly on it, young Master
Wilding. It 's all werry well for you gentlemen that is
accustomed to take your wine into your systems by your
conwivial throttles to put a lively face upon it ; but I have
been accustomed to take my wine in at the pores. And
took that way, it acts depressing ! It 's one thing, gentle-
men, to charge your glasses in a dining-room with a Hip
Hurrah and a Jolly Companions Every One! and another
thing to charge yourself by the pores in a low cellar. I 've
been a cellarman all my life, and what 's the consequence ?
I 'm as muddled a man as lives — you won't find a muddleder
than me, or my ekal in moloncolly !
BINTRY. I don't want to stop the flow of Master Joey's phi-
losophy, but it is past ten o'clock, and the new house-
keeper is coming.
WILDING. Let her come! my friend George Vendale is to see
them and recommend the one that seems best.
BINTRY (rises). I '11 look in again presently. ( JOEY goes
up c. with him to open D. in r.) Thank you, Joey.
1 [Exit D. in.jf.
JOEY (comes down c.). So you have taken a new partner,
young Master Vendale in, sir?
WILDING. Yes, Joey.
470 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT i
JOEY. But don't change the name of the firm again, young
Master Wilding ! It was bad luck enough to make it Your-
self and Co. Better by far have left it Pebbleson Nephew,
that good luck always stuck to ! Never change luck when
it is good, sir! never change luck. (Up L.)
Enter from set house on stoop, L., GEOEGE VENDALE.
VENDALE. Well, I have seen the new housekeeper. Her name
is Sarah Goldstraw!
WILDING (startled, R. c.). Goldstraw! Surely I have heard
that name before.
VENDALE. If she is an old acquaintance, all the better. Here
she is. I '11 go and inspect the rest of the establishment.
[Exit down back of stairs, L. u. s.
Enter from house and down front steps, SALLY.
WILDING. I have seen her before !
SALLY (aside). Wilding! Wilding! It is a common name
enough! (Recognises WILDING.) Ah!
JOEY (to WILDING). Take her, young Master Wilding.
You won't find a match for Sarah Goldstraw in a hurry !
(Aside. ) I feel as if I had taken something new into my
system at the pores ! Has that pleasant woman brought
the pleasant sunshine into this moloncolly place, I won-
der? I will think over it in the cellar.
[Exit L. 2 E. ceUar door.
WILDING. Will you please step this way into the counting-
room?
SALLY (aside. ) I must be mistaken. (Crosses to a. 1 E.,
opens door, starts.) Oh, my!
WILDING (n. c.). What's the matter?
SALLY. Nothing.
WILDING. Nothing?
SALLY. No ! excepting — what — what is that — that portrait
hanging up in the counting-house?
WILDING. The portrait of my late dear mother !
SALLY. Of your mother? (Aside.) It is like the lady who
spoke to me twelve years ago. (Aloud.) I hope you
NO THOROUGHFARE 471
ACT ij
will pardon my taking up your time, sir. (Crouine to
L.) I don't think this place will suit me! (E.)
WILDING. Stop, stop! There is something wrong here!
something I do not understand !— Your face puzzles me!
Ah! (Hand to forehead, bewildered.) I have it! You
were at the Foundling twelve years ago !
SALLY. What shall I say?
WILDING. You were the nurse who was kind to my mother,
and pointed me out to her!
SALLY. Great heaven forgive me ! I was.
WILDING. Great heaven forgive you? What do you mean?
Speak out.
SALLY. Dreadful consequences have followed, I am afraid,
because I forgot my duty, for that lady —
WILDING. That lady ! She calls my mother the lady. When
you speak of my mother why don't you say — my mother?
SALLY. Oh ! sir, I was deceived and so was the lady.
WILDING. Why can't you speak plainer? You mean my
mother ?
SALLY. I will speak the truth, but I wish I hadn't to do it,
sir! When I was away to our country institution, there
came to our house a lady, a Mrs. Miller, who adopted out
one of the children. Six months afterwards I came back,
and knew nothing about that. That 's how the child was
taken away —
WILDING. You — you mean me?
SALLY. No, sir. I mean the child of that lady. (Points
off n. 1 E.) You were not her child. You cannot regret
it more than I do. A few days after I had gone away
the child was adopted and taken away. But another
boy had just been received, and so they gave him his place
and called him Walter Wilding ! Of course, I knew noth-
ing of this ! I thought you were still the same infant that
I had cared for at the first. Indeed, I was not to blame!
It was not my fault.
WILDING. Is it dark, or am I dreaming? Give me your
hand! (SALLY comes to him, c.)
SALLY. What is the matter?
WILDING. I can't see you ! The noise is in my head.
472 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT i
SALLY. Shall I get some water? Shall I call for help?
WILDING. No ! give me your hand ! How do I know your
story is true?
SALLY. Would I have told you if I were mistaken.
WILDING. Oh ! I loved her so dearly. I felt so fondly that
I was her son!
SALLY. Let your head rest on my shoulder, — not the first
time, my boy. I have rocked you to sleep in my arms
when a child, many and many 's the time. (Embraces
WILDING, who is seated on barrel, L. of table-barrel.)
WILDING. Oh, Sally, why did you not speak before?
SALLY. I couldn't, sir ! I did not know it till two years ago,
when I went to the institution to see one of the girls, and
she told me all. If I had only not come here for the
housekeeper's place you would never have known to your
dying day what you know now ! Oh, don't blame me !
You forced me to speak ! don't blame me !
WILDING. You would have concealed this from me, if you
could? (c.) Don't talk that way ! She left me all that
I possess in the persuasion that I was her son. I am not
her son. Would you have me enjoy the fortune of
another man? He must be found! What was the name
of the lady who adopted the child?
SALLY. Mrs. Miller, sir.
WILDING. Where does she live?
SALLY. No one knows, sir. She took the child to Switzer-
land.
WILDING. Switzerland? What part of Switzerland?
SALLY. No one knows, sir.
BINTRY enters R. 1 E.
BINTRY. How are you getting on with the new housekeeper?
Bless me, what is the matter?
JOEY, with candle, enters L. 2 E., cellar-door, slowly,
stays up L.
WILDING. Sally, tell him in your own words, — I cannot
speak. (To L., leaning against banisters.)
XO THOROUGHFARE 473
ACT ij
BINTRY (to SALLY). Step into the counting-house for a little
time. I will be with you.
[Exit SALLY, R. 1 E. D., crosses to WILDING.
JOEY (comes down). I hope, young Master Wilding, that
Sarah Goldstraw is not going to be sent away,?
WILDING. Sarah Goldstraw is a good, kind-hearted woman,
and shall stay here. Mr. Bintry, the lost Walter Wilding
must be found.
BINTRY. Not easy after a lapse of twenty years. At this
time of day, you will find it no thoroughfare, sir, no
thoroughfare.
WILDING. It must be done. I will make my will, and leave
all I have to him before I sleep this night.
Enter VENDALE, R. 1 E.
My friend, you don't know what a blow has befallen me.
VENDALE (shaking WILDING'S hand). Sarah has just told
me.
WILDING. You will take my side, George! You will help
me to find the lost man ! If neither of you will help me,
I will go to Switzerland myself.
VENDALE. Don't talk like that. I am your partner in all
ways.
BINTRY. How will you find the lost man? If we advertise,
we lay ourselves open to every rogue in the kingdom.
(R. c.)
WILDING. You don't understand me! It is because I loved
her that I feel it my duty to do justice to her son ! If he
is a living man, I will find him, for her sake, his and my
own! (c.) I am only a miserable impostor!
VENDALE. Don't talk like that! As to your being an im-
postor, that is simply absurd, for no man can be that
without being a consenting party to the imposition. You
need not distress yourself. We will help you. Come,
compose yourself. (L. c.)
JOEY, who has been up at gate in F., comes down with
letter and card.
WILDING. What is it, Joey?
474 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT i
JOEY. A foreign gentleman give me this card and letter.
WILDING (reads card). Jules Obenreizer!
VENDALE (takes letter). Obenreizer! from Switzerland.
WILDING. Switzerland!
VENDALE. I have seen him before.
WILDING. Something tells me I am near the man !
VENDALE. Mr. Obenreizer is an old travelling companion,
whose acquaintance I made in Switzerland. (Reads let-
ter.) 'Mr. Obenreizer is fully accredited as our agent,
and we do not doubt you will esteem his merits.' Signed
'Defresnier & Co., Neuchatel.' (c.)
WILDING. So you met him on the mountains? (a. c.)
BINTRY (L. aside). Mr. Vendale seems confused. That is a
bad sign to begin with.
VENDALE. Yes, he was with a young lady —
WILDING. His daughter?
VENDALE. No ! he is no older than you are. His niece.
BINTRY. And you fell in love with her? Excuse my legal
habit of helping out an unwilling witness !
VENDALE (laughs). I am not an unwilling witness, Mr.
Bintry ! I do love her — I loved her then, and I shall love
her to the end of the calendar! Is that an unwilling
answer?
BINTRY. I can't say. I am not professionally acquainted
with the subject.
WILDING. George, you seem confused?
VENDALE. The fact is, I rather talked of my family, to make
an impression on the young lady.
WILDING. Come, if you object you need not meet him.
VENDALE. Pshaw! Mr. Obenreizer is recommended to our
house, and we would be sure to meet in the way of business,
so that the sooner it is over the better for me.
JOEY opens gate and lets in OBENREIZER, who comes down c«
to shake WILDING'S hand.
WILDING. I am glad to see you, sir. This is my friend and
legal adviser, Mr. Bintry.
OBENREIZER (shakes BINTRY'S hand). Charmed! charmed to
make Mr. Bintry's acquaintance. (L.)
NO THOROUGHFARE 475
ACT l]
BINTBY (aside). He is too civil by half. I don't like him.
WILDING. Mr. Vendale you know !
VENDALE (shakes OBENREIZER'S hand). You are doubtless
surprised to meet me here as partner with Mr. Wilding?
OBENREIZER. On the contrary, no. As I said when we were
on the mountains. We call them vast, but the world is
so little, one cannot keep away from some persons.
(Quickly.) Not that any one would wish to get rid of
you, Mr. Vendale! Oh, dear no! So glad to have met
you! So glad! (Half embracing VENDALE.)
BINTRY (aside). Rather a tigerish way of being glad.
OBENREIZER. Though you are descended from so fine a fam-
ily, you have condescended to come into trade? Stop
though. Wines? Is it trade in England or profession?
Not fine arts? (Smiling.)
VENDALE. Mr. Obenreizer, I was but a silly young fellow in
the first flush of coming into the fortune my parents left
me. I hope what I said when we travelled together was
more youthful openness of speech than vanity!
OBENREIZER. You tax yourself too heavily I You tax your-
self, my faith ! as if you were your government taxing
you ! I liked your conversation ! I like your conversion !
It is the misfortune of trade that any lower people may
take to it and climb by it. I for example — I a man of
low origin — for what I know of it — no origin at all!
WILDING (aside to BINTRY, L.). Do you hear that?
BINTRY. No ! I am deaf on principle to all humbugs !
VENDALE (R. c., to OBENREIZER). And Madame Dor?
OBENREIZER. Oh, she is well. She is with Marguerite —
BINTRY. You seem rather young to be a young lady's
guardian, Mr. Obenreizer?
OBENREIZER. Young in years, Mr. Bintry, but old in dis-
cretion and in experience. Her father was my half-
brother — if he was my brother? — a poor peasant, and
when he was dying, leaving her a little fortune, he called
me to him, and told me, 'All for Marguerite.' Ah, Mr.
Wilding ! I may be this, or I may be that, but one thing I
know! I shall live and I shall die true to my trust!
(Pause.) Well, we are house-hunting now, and she shall
476 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT i
have a home replete with gratified wishes! (Aside.)
Though where the money is to come from is another mat-
ter. (Turns up c. a little.)
WILDING (to BINTRY). He is not sure of his origin! he is
doubtful of his parentage! Do you hear that?
BINTRY. No ! Mr. Wilding, I do not hear that !
VENDALE (R. c., to OBENREIZER). And Madame Dor?
OBENREIZER. Oh, she is well. She is with Marguerite —
VENDALE. Abroad?
OBENREIZER. Here ! here waiting for me without.
WILDING. What! ladies kept waiting at my door? I will
go bring them in —
OBENREIZER. Not for worlds ! (Prevents VENDALE and
WILDING going up c., goes up c. to gate, which JOEY opens
slowly.)
WILDING (to BINTRY). I must do something in this!
BINTRY. There is one thing you can do — hold your tongue!
OBENREIZER (leads in MARGUERITE and MADAME DOR down
c.). My niece! (MARGUERITE comes down L. c., to VEN-
DALE.) Madame Dor! (MADAME DOR crosses side-wise
to R., side of barrel-table, bach to characters on stage, rub-
bing glove. ) The guardian angel of my wardrobe ! you
will excuse her — she is now at my gloves ! to-morrow, it
may be, darning my stockings or making pudding. Ah!
you English, who delight in domestic matters. You like it
in your pictures, you like it in your books ! Ah, Madame
Dor makes me my good, solid, heavy, indigestible English
pudding! Only look at her back — (points to MADAME
DOR, R. by table) it is as broad as her heart! (c.)
VENDALE (to MARGUERITE). Mr. Obenreizer was saying that
the world is so small a place that people cannot escape
one another. If it had been less, I might have found you
sooner! It is still a curious coincidence that you come to
London the day I become partner in a house to which Mr.
Obenreizer's firm in Switzerland introduce him.
OBENREIZER (coming between). Ah! London is the place —
city of luxury, if you are rich, like Mr. Vendale here!
Some are lucky ! While they were saying to him, 'Come
here, my darling, kiss me!' I was called 'Little wretch,
NO THOROUGHFARE 477
SC. l]
come taste the stick!' (gesture with cane) I dwelt among
a sorry set in Switzerland! Would I could forget it!
(WILDING touches BINTRY to notice.)
MARGUERITE. For my part, I love Switzerland.
OBENREIZER (quickly, tenderly). Marguerite, so do I. But
speak in proud England!
MARGUERITE. I speak in proud earnest! And I am not
noble, but a peasant's daughter.
VENDALE. And I honour and fully appreciate your senti-
ment!
OBENREIZER. Ah! (interposing) Marguerite, we will set
about our house-hunting.
WILDING. Mr. Obenreizer! (c.)
BINTRY. Mr. Wilding, will you hold your tongue?
OBENREIZER. My dear Mr. Vendale, you must come see us
often when we are settled. Mr. Wilding, the same. Mr.
Bintry! (bows). We will transact business together, and
be firm friends. Adieu! (Bows, escorts MARGUERITE
and MADAME DOR in c. — VENDALE L. side, with BINTRY
and WILDING R. c.)
VENDALE (aside). How he guards his niece!
WILDING. This may be the lost man !
CURTAIN
ACT II
SCENE I. — Room in OBENREIZER'S house, discovering MAR-
GUERITE standing at window, L. in r., and MADAME DOR
seated at table by same — OBENREIZER, E.
MARGUERITE (aside). Not come — not come yet! (Turns
sadly from looking out of window.)
OBENREIZER (counting money, R. 1 E., at press in set). One
hundred— two— four hundred— fifty— four hundred and
fifty. Fifty pounds still wanted to make up the missing
sum. That sum I must replace, or I am a lost man!
(To table R. front.) Ah! this miserable luxury— this hoi-
478 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT H
low show! Has Marguerite any idea of what this splen-
dour costs me? Has she even noticed it? Yes, within
the last few weeks she has been more animated and kinder.
Something like affection is in her ways. She does not
even think of that man Vendale.
MARGUERITE (aside). Still no signs of him!
OBENREIZER (aside). What! he has sent nothing as a birth-
day present. He has forgotten her, then ! Oh, if he had
sent her a present it would have been something so rich
that her proud spirit would have revolted. I will put up
the money. Yet (hesitating) I might replace it by a
month. Nonsense ! it is not to be thought of. Disgrace
myself? Ah! it would ruin me for life! What would
Marguerite say when she looked on me as a felon ! I will
put the money up ; he will not come.
MARGUERITE (suddenly). Oh! he is crossing the square.
Here he comes. (Turns to D. in F.)
OBENREIZER. He! Who?
MARGUERITE. Mr. Vendale.
OBENREIZER (aside). Then he has not forgotten her! (R.
front. )
Enter VENDALE, D. in v.
VENDALE (to MARGUERITE.) Permit me to wish you many
happy returns of the day. Will you accept a little me-
mento? (Gives jewel case.)
MARGUERITE. Jewels ! They are too rich for me !
VENDALE. You have not opened it yet.
MARGUERITE. So simple a present (turning to OBENREIZER)
I may keep?
OBENREIZER (sneering). The modesty of wealth!
MARGUERITE (to VENDALE). I own that you have pleased
and flattered me. (Puts on brooch.)
OBENREIZER (aside). He forces me to it. (Gets money from
press, R. 1 E.; aloud.) Mr. Vendale has reminded me that
I have not yet made my offering; you will excuse me?
(VENDALE bows — up to D. in F. ; aside.) Ah, Mr. Ven-
dale, come what may, you will not get the upper hand of
me now! [Exit, t>. in F.
NO THOROUGHFARE 479
SC. l]
VENDALE {aside}. I will wait here with the greatest pleasure
till he comes back! My opportunity has come at last.
No! Madame Dor! Is there no means of getting this
piece of human furniture out of the room? (MADAME
DOE leans forward, sleeping.) She lets her work fall
unheeded to the floor. Oh! best of women, yield to the
voice of Nature, and fall asleep. (MADAME DOR does
so — VENDALE comes down c. to MARGUERITE.) I have
something to say to you — a secret to impart. (Seated
beside her.)
MARGUERITE. What claim have I to any secret of yours, Mr.
Vendale ?
VENDALE. You have not forgotten the happy time when we
first met and were travelling together. Out of all the
impressions I brought back from Switzerland, there was
one impression chief. Can you guess what it is?
MABGUERITE. I cannot guess. An impression of the moun-
tains ?
VENDALE. No, more precious.
MARGUERITE. Of the lakes?
VENDALE. No ! the lakes have not grown dearer to me every
day ! Marguerite, all that makes life worth having, hangs,
for me, on a word from your lips. Marguerite, I love
you!
MARGUERITE. Oh, Mr. Vendale! Have you forgotten the
distance between us?
VENDALE (prevents her rising.) There can be but one dis-
tance between us, Marguerite — that of your own making.
There is no higher rank in goodness and in beauty than
yours !
MARGUERITE. Ah! Think of your family, and think of
mine! (Rises.)
VENDALE. If you dwell on such an obstacle, I shall think
only that I have offended you! (Rues.)
MARGUERITE (forgetting herself). Oh, no, George!
VENDALE. Say you love me!
MARGUERITE. I love you! (Embrace, starts, goe$ up to
L. u. corner.)
480 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT ii
OBENREIZER enters, D. in F. — MADAME DOR is awakened
by MARGUERITE.
OBENREIZER (as men bring in flowers in stand and place them
up c. against F.) Now you will see that your birthday
is not forgotten. (R. front.)
MARGUERITE (c. up). I thank you.
OBENREIZER. Oh, not for them! My present is not made
yet! Flowers will fade. Wear these! (presents jewel-
case) and give them a beauty which is not their own.
MARGUERITE (takes case). Oh, how could you buy these for
me! how can you expect me to wear these? I would have
been contented with the flowers. (Goes up to L. u. cor-
ner.) Madame Dor, we will be late. We must dress for
dinner. [Exit L. D. with MADAME DOR.
OBENREIZER (aside). She wears his offering round her neck!
My crime is useless ! I have put my whole life in peril,
and this is my reward! Oh, curses on her glitter and her
beauty !
VENDALE. What is the matter, friend? (L. c.)
OBENREIZER (sarcastically). Friend! Nothing!
VENDALE. Stay! I have something to say to you. (c.
front. )
OBENREIZER (R. c. front). Excuse me. I am not quite my-
self. You want to speak to me — oh ! on business, I sup-
pose.
VENDALE. On something much more important than mere
business.
OBENREIZER. I am at your service. Go on. (Seated R.
side of table, VENDALE seated L. side.)
VENDALE. Perhaps you may have noticed latterly that my
admiration for your charming niece —
OBENREIZER. Noticed? Not I!
VENDALE. Has grown into a deeper feeling —
OBENREIZER (uneasily). Shall we say friendship, Mr. Ven-
dale?
VENDALE (rises). I ask you to give me her hand in mar-
riage !
OBENREIZER (starts up). You ask me! (Restrains his
anger. )
NO THOROUGHFARE 481
EC. l]
VENDALE. Stay, I beg you to tell me plainly what objection
you see to my suit?
OBENREIZER. The immense one that my niece is the daughter
of a poor peasant and you the son of an English gentle-
man.
VENDALE. I ought to know my own countrymen better than
you do, Mr. Obenreizer. In the estimation of everybody
whose opinion is worth having, my wife would be the one
sufficient justification of my marriage. We are both men
of business, and you naturally expect me to satisfy you
that I have the means of supporting a wife. I am in a
trade which I see my way to gradually improving. As
it stands at present I can state my annual income at fifteen
hundred pounds. Do you object to me on pecuniary
grounds?
OBENREIZER (abruptly). Yes!
VENDALE. Yes! It is not enough?
OBENREIZER. It is not half enough for a foreign wife who
has half your social prejudices to conquer. Tell me, Mr.
Vendale, on your £1500 a year, can your wife live iu a
fashionable quarter, have a butler to wait at her table,
and a carriage and horses to drive about in? Yes or no?
VENDALE. Come to the point! You view this question as a
question of terms?
OBENREIZER. Terms, as you say ! terms beyond your reach !
VENDALE. Sir !
OBENREIZER. Make your income three thousand pounds and
come to me then!
VENDALE. Then I will speak with her.
OBENREIZER. You surely would not speak to my niece on this
subject?
VENDALE. I have opened my whole heart to her, and have
reason to hope —
OBENREIZER (passionately). What! Mr. Vendale, as a man
of honour, speaking to a man of honour, how can you
justify such conduct as this?
VENDALE. The best excuse is the assurance that I have had
from her own lips that she loves me— (n. front.)
OBENREIZER (passionately). She lo— Oh! (violently) we I
482 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT ii
soon see about that ! ( Goes over to L. D. ) Marguerite !
Marguerite! (Aside.) How lovely she looks!
Enter, L. D., MARGUERITE.
MARGUERITE. You wish to speak to me?
OBENREIZER. Yes, my child, I wish to speak to you — to ask
a question. Mr. Vendale says — (hand to forehead, as in
pain).
MARGUERITE. How altered you are in your manner. Are
you not well? What have I done? (up L.).
OBENREIZER (forgetting himself). Done! you have turned
the knife in the wound ! No ! I don't mean that ! I mean
— But we are forgetting Mr. Vendale. He has said
(sneering) that you said you loved him? It is not true,
my child?
MARGUERITE (comes down L. c.). It is true!
OBENREIZER. Oh! Great God! (in a suppressed voice, c.).
MARGUERITE. You frighten me!
VENDALE (triumphantly). Are you satisfied now?
OBENREIZER. Wait ! wait a little ! I have my authority yet,
as she is my ward. Marguerite, you know that your
father entrusted you to me, you cannot marry without my
consent. Whatever Mr. Vendale says — if I say wait, you
will wait!
MARGUERITE. Oh! (VENDALE glances at her imploringly.)
VENDALE. Oh, Marguerite!
CEENREIZER (violently). You will wait, my child?
MARGUERITE. Yes! (submissively clasps her hands and hangs
her head).
OBENREIZER. Are you answered?
VENDALE (firmly). I am. You have heard from her own
lips that she loves me. I will make the fifteen hundred
three thousand pounds.
OBENREIZER. Make it three thousand!
VENDALE. Adieu, Marguerite!
MARGUERITE. Oh! George! (VENDALE turns.)
OBENREIZER. Ah, Mr. Vendale! You are not her husband
yet! (going up L. with one hand of MARGUERITE'S in his,
VENDALE at D. in F. ).
(Scene closes in.)
XO THOROUGHFARE 483
sc. n]
SCENE II. — Room in WILDING'S house. — MR. BINTHY enters
R., hands under his coat-tails, in thought, crosses to L.,
turns and to D. R. in F.
Enter SALLY, R. D.
SALLY. Oh, Mr. Bintry, so you have come to see master !
BINTRY. Yes, I have come to see how he is getting on.
SALLY. I am afraid he is worse. The new doctor has ordered
that he must not be disturbed, (c.)
BINTRY (R. c.). Another doctor called in! When I was
here last, Mr. Wilding could walk and talk.
SALLY. He can walk and talk yet, but I must agree with
the doctors. He is dying — growing back more and more
like him I used to call my little child at the Foundling.
BINTRY. Well, Miss Goldstraw, you may be old enough to
be his mother, but you certainly don't look it.
SALLY. Thank you, sir, for the compliment!
BINTRY. You are heartily welcome.
SALLY. Don't you think, sir, you could make him better by
doing more as he wishes, sir?
BINTRY. Miss Goldstraw, you have your duty to perform,
and I have mine. My duty as a professional man is to
keep my old friend from all rogues — Mr. Obenreizer, for
example. (Crosses to L.)
SALLY. But you go contrary to his will, sir.
BINTRY. Contrary to his will — I wish we could go contrary
to his will. I drew it up and had it executed! the most
absurd document ever put on paper! Vendale and I were
bound by it as executors to find a lost man, no matter
what he is ! and give up to him a fortune. By drawing up
that document I have committed professional suicide, and
yet the worthy woman says I have not humoured my client.
SALLY. Excuse me, sir. I see closer than you. It is wear-
ing his life out.
BINTRY. Come, speak out if you think I can be of any serv-
ice to my old friend! What can I do?
SALLY. Find the lost man!
BINTRY. If I do, I '11 be— (stops short on SALLY lifting her
hands ) .
484 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT ii
SALLY. Oh, sir ! if you 'd only promise to let him have his
own way, and try to find the lost man?
BINTRY. Was there ever such perversity ! Here 's a man
dying to find a man who will rob him of every penny he
possesses and leave him a pauper. Humph ! Well, I '11
put an advertisement in the papers, telling the client to
apply to my office, to me, mind you — it Avill be a devilish
lucky man who will get a fortune out of me, I can tell
you! (Crosses to L. and returns to c.)
SALLY (R. c.). Thank you, sir, for my master. Ah, you
may have a rough outside, but I see that you are a warm-
hearted man !
BINTRY (going R., turn-s and comes close to SALLY, after
pause). Miss Goldstraw, don't you take away my char-
acter! Well, I will set about it, and come to-morrow.
[Exit R.
SALLY (to D. in F., which opens). Oh, my dear master!
Enter WILDING, D. in F.
WILDING. I thought I heard Mr. Bintry? (to c. assisted by
SALLY).
SALLY (R. c.). He was here only a minute. He is coming
again to-morrow, sir.
WILDING. Always to-morrow ! When it is now that we
ought to find the man. (Querulously. ) Nobody helps
me.
SALLY. Mr. Bintry says he will try, sir.
WILDING. Mr. Bintry is too suspicious, and drives people
away. (Aside.) The more I think of it the more I see
that everything points one way. Obenreizer is the man !
I think of him by day, and I dream of him by night.
(Aloud.) Sally, I may call you Sally?
SALLY. Dear, yes, sir,
WILDING. For the sake of the old times let it be Sally.
SALLY. Of course, sir. Do you try to be the good boy that
you always were at the Foundling, the good patient little
boy. Try to be patient now.
WILDING. Something tells me I must lose no time. I must
see Mr. Obenreizer at once.
NO THOROUGHFARE 485
sc. in]
SALLY. Yes, sir, I will send for him.
WILDING. I must and will see him.
SALLY. Yes, yes, sir.
WILDING. Where is Mr. Vendale?
SALLY. Gone to Mr. Obenreizer's.
WILDING. Ah! gone to propose to his pretty niece. Ven-
dale 's a dear good friend, and I wish him all success. He
is not so suspicious as Mr. Bintry, and I think he will
aid me.
SALLY. I am sure of it, sir.
WILDING. Then you will send for Mr. Obenreizer?
SALLY. I promise to send there, sir.
WILDING. You will relieve my mind.
SALLY. I will do it, sir, but be a good child, and go to bed.
WILDING. Sally, Sally! how little changed things are since
we met for the first time. Mr. Obenreizer says, 'The
world is so small that it is not strange how often the same
people come together at various stages of life.' After
all, I have come round to my foundling nurse to die!
SALLY. No ! no ! dear Master Wilding, not going to . die !
(Leads him out D. in F.) No! [Exit D. in F.
SCENE III. — Cellar in WILDING'S stores — JOEY discovered up
a. measuring casks and bins, etc. VENDALE comes down
L. platform to front.
VENDALE. Poor Wilding ! I would tell him what took place
at Obenreizer's, but he has troubles of his own to engross
him. My spirits are depressed, spite of myself, as if some-
thing evil was overhanging me. Can I do what I have
engaged myself to do? Can I double this business in a
year's time? I have been wandering about these old cel-
lars like a perturbed spirit. Oh, you are here, are you,
Joey? (Takes candle and comes down L. side listlessly,
comes down around and up c.)
JOEY. Oughtn't it rather to go, Oh, you 're here, are you,
Master George ? For it 's my business here, and not
yours ! .
VENDALE. Don't grumble, Joey.
486 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT H
JOEY. I don't grumble ! It 's what I took in at the pores.
Have a care that something in you don't begin a-grum-
bling, Master George ! Stop here long enough, and the
wapors will be at work — trust 'em for it ! So you 've
regularly come into the business, Master George?
VENDALE. Yes, Joey. I hope you don't object?
JOEY. Oh! I don't, bless you! But wapors object that
you 're too young. You and Master Wilding are too
young. Master has not changed the luck of the firm.
VENDALE. Pooh !
JOEY. Pooh! is an easy word to speak, Master George, but
I have not been a cellarman down here all my life for
nothing. I know by what I notices down here when it 's
a-going to rain, when it 's a-going to hold up, when it 's
a-going to blow, and when it 's a-going to be calm. I
know when the luck 's changed quite as well.
VENDALE (taking rod up). Has this growth on the roof
anything to do with your divination, Joey? We are fa-
mous for this growth in our vaults, aren't we?
JOEY. We are, Master George, and if you '11 take advice by
me, you '11 let it alone.
VENDALE. Why, Joey?
JOEY. For three good reasons !
VENDALE. Let 's hear the good reasons for letting the fungus
alone. (Playing with webs.)
JOEY. Why, because it rises from the casks of wine and may
leave you to judge what sort of wapors a cellarman takes
into his system when he walks in the same, and because at
one stage of its growth it 's maggots !
VENDALE. Maggots ! What other reason ?
JOEY. I wouldn't keep touching of it, Master George, if I
was you ! Take a look at its colour !
VENDALE. I am looking. Well, Joey, the colour?
JOEY. Is it like (mysteriously) clotted blood, Master George?
VENDALE. It is rather like.
JOEY. Is it more than like! (Shakes his head.)
VENDALE. Say it is exactly like! What then? (Playing
with the cobweb as before.)
sc NO THOROUGHFARE 437
JOEY. Well, Master George, they do saj
VENDALE (carelessly). Who?
JOEY. How should I know who? Them as says pretty well
everything! How can I tell who they are?
VENDALE. True. Go on, Joey !
JOEY. They do say, that the man who gets by any accident
a piece of that right upon his breast—
VENDALE (playing with stick and web, mechanically). On his
breast ?
JOEY. For sure and certain —
VENDALE. For sure and certain?
JOEY. Will die by murder!
VENDALE. Murder ! ( Web drops on his left breast and vest,
lets rod fatt.)
OBENREIZER appears on platform, L., front.
VENDALE. What do you want here?
OBENREIZER (comes down L. platform to stage to c.). Mr.
Vendale, I come on a sad errand. You need a friend — a
true friend. I will try to be it again. I hope you will
forget how we parted, when I say that I regret my man-
ner of receiving you. (To c.) Mr. Vendale, I ask your
pardon.
VENDALE. I accept the apology.
OBENREIZER (softly.) Won't you shake hands with me?
(They shake hands.) Mr. Vendale, prepare yourself for
a shock.
VENDALE. What is it?
OBENREIZER. I come to bring you sad tidings —
VENDALE. Is it of Wilding? Is my poor friend worse?
OBENREIZER. Worse!
VENDALE. Not —
OBENREIZER. He is —
VENDALE. Dead?
OBENREIZER. Dead!
JOEY (up c.). Dead!
VENDALE. Dead ! My poor friend ! Ah, Joey, your super-
stition spoke truth. This was a warning of death.
488 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT in
JOEY (comes down R. c.). I did not say death, Master
George, I said murder!
JOEY. OBENREIZER. VENDALJE.
R. c. L.
CURTAIN
ACT III
SCENE I. — Counting-room in WILDING'S house, discovering
VENDALE at table R. c. front, and SALLY beside him.
SALLY. Have you any more questions to ask me, sir?
VENDALE. Yes — tell me again all that passed just before
poor Wilding died.
SALLY. He had been asking for Mr. Obenreizer, who had
been sent for — and when he came he sat up to try to speak
to him, but before he could say a word, he fell back again.
The doctor ordered Mr. Obenreizer to leave the room.
Mr. Wilding died soon after — only spoke a word, but I
am sure he breathed your name.
VENDALE. I am sure of that! (with, emotion). So no one
knows what he wanted so eagerly to say to Mr. Obenreizer.
The mystery is wrapped in denser obscurity than ever.
My poor dear friend ! I know what his trust was, and
if the missing man is to be found, I will find him. (Knock
R. 1 E. D.) Who's there? Come in.
Enter JOEY, R. 1 E. D., with letter.
JOEY. A letter, sir, from foreign parts.
VENDALE (takes letter). From Defresnier and Co., of Neu-
chatel. The answer to mine.
JOEY (to SALLY, L. u. E. corner). Do you find yourself, miss,
getting over the shock of young Master Wilding's death?
SALLY. Mr. Joey, we all have to submit to losses in this
world. I am learning, I hope, to submit to mine.
[Exit L. u. E.
JOEY (aside). Beautiful language! beautiful! The parson
NO THOROUGHFARE 489
SC. Ij
himself couldn't have said it better than she. I '11 try to
remember it before I forget it, like the catechism. 'We
must all submit to learning, which is one of the losses in
this world!'
VENDALE (aside, E. c. front). Just when it is most impor-
tant for me to increase the value of the business, it is
threatened with a loss of five hundred pounds. Ah, Mar-
guerite !
JOEY (comes down R. side). Ah! Master George, I know
what 's on your mind. It 's those six cases of red wine
sent from the place called Noocattle, instead of the white.
VENDALE. The devil take the six cases !
JOEY. The devil sent them, sir. It 's foreign to my nature
to crow over the house I serve, but hasn't it come true
what I said to young Master Wilding, respecting the
changing the name of the firm, when I said that you might
find one of these days that he 'd changed the luck of the
firm? Did I set myself up as a prophet? No! Has
what I said to him come true ? Yes ! What 's the con-
sequence? You write to them at Noocattle, and they write
back. You, not satisfied, write to them again; and they,
not satisfied, write back again ; and that 's the letter you
have in your hand, as chock full of bad news as a egg is
full of meat. In the time of Pebbleson Nephew, young
Master George, no such thing was ever known as a mistake
made in a consignment to our house. I don't want to
intrude my moloncolly on you, sir, so let me recommend
the beautiful language of Miss Goldstraw, fitted to the
case : 'We must all learn to submit to our losses, which is
one of the learnings in this world!' Reflect over them,
Mr. Vendale. I 'm going to the wapors awaiting in the
cellar for mel [&*** *- 1 E-
VENDALE. This is most unfortunate! (To desk up L.)
Let me put the correspondence in order. (Takes up let-
ters.) First I write to Defresnier and Co., saying the
number of cases per last consignment was quite correct,
but on six of them being opened they were found to con-
tain a red wine instead of champagne, a mistake probably
caused 'by a similarity of the brand. The matter can be
490 TSTO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT in
easily set right by your sending us six cases of cham-
pagne, or by crediting us with the value of six cases red
on the five hundred pounds last remitted you, to which
they reply : 'The statement of the error has led to a very
unexpected discovery — a serious affair for you and us.
Having no more champagne of the vintage last sent to
you, we made arrangements to credit your firm with the
value of the six cases, when a reference to our books re-
sulted in the moral certainty that no such remittance as
you mention ever reached our house, and a literal certainty
that no such remittance has been paid to our account at
the bank. We have not even a suspicion who the thief is,
but we believe you will assist us towards discovery by see-
ing whether the receipt (forged of course) purporting to
come from our house is entirely in MSS. or a numbered
and printed form. Anxiously waiting your reply, we re-
main,' etc. etc. Ah! Next I write to the Swiss firm, and
receive the answer I hold in my hand. (Reads.) 'Dear
Sir: Your discovery that the forged receipt is executed
on one of our regular forms has caused inexpressible sur-
prise and distress to us. At the time when your remittance
was stolen but three keys were in existence opening the
strong box in which our receipt-forms are invariably kept.
My partner had one key, I another. The third was in pos-
session of a gentleman who, at that period, occupied a
position of trust in our house. I cannot prevail on myself
to inform you who the person is. Forgive my silence, the
motive of it is good.' Who can this be? However, it is
useless for me to inquire in my position. 'The handwrit-
ing on your receipt must by compared with certain speci-
mens in our possession. I cannot send you them, for busi-
ness reasons, and must beg you to send the receipt to
Neuchatel, and, in making this request, I must accompany
it by a word of warning. If the person, at whom sus-
picion now points, really proves to be the person who has
committed this forgery and theft, the only evidence against
him is the evidence in your hands, and he is a man who will
stick at nothing to obtain and destroy it. I strongly urge
you not to trust the receipt to the post. Send it, without
NO THOROUGHFARE 491
sc. ij
loss of time, by a private messenger accustomed to travel-
ling, capable of speaking French; a man of courage, a
man of honesty, and, above all, a man who can be trusted
to let no stranger scrape acquaintance with him on the
route. Tell no one — absolutely no one — but your mes-
senger of the turn this matter has now taken. The safe
transit of the receipt may depend on your interpreting
literally the advice which I give you at the end of this
letter.' Now I know the man who writes these words. He
would not have written them without good reasons. Who
can I send? There is no man I know of. None of the
clerks speak French.
Music to OBENREIZER'S entrance.
OBENREIZER (m R. 1 E.). May I come in?
VENDALE. Certainly.
OBENREIZER, R. 1 E., puts hat and cane on table up u. c.,
against fiat, and comes down.
JOEY (R. 1 E., aside). He stole in here just as he stole into
the cellars to tell of Master Wilding's death. He was by
when the web fell on Master George, he is by when that
letter of bad news comes. I will watch. I don't like this
Mr. Openrazor! [Exit R. 1 E.
OBENREIZER. Ah, Mr. Vendale, you look as if there was
something the matter!
VENDALE. Yes, you come at a bad time. I am threatened
with the loss of five hundred pounds. (R. 2 E.)
OBENREIZER. Five hundred pounds! (Aside.) Ah!
VENDALE (at safe in wall R. 2 E.). Your own house is one
of the parties in the affair.
OBENREIZER. Indeed! (Aside.) The forged receipt.
(Aloud.) Tell me how it has happened. (Aside.) I
wonder where he has got the receipt? If he only takes it
out of his safe —
VENDALE. Ah! (Takes paper out of safe, R. 2 E.) Here
is the forged receipt.
OEEKREI&ER (up L., aside). He is alone. I am stronger
than him. (About to cross to R.)
492 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT in
Enter JOEY, R. 1 E.
JOEY. Did you call, Master George?
VENDALE. No ! Joey, don't disturb me !
JOEY. I '11 keep the door open this time. [Exit R. 1 E.
OBENREIZER (aside). Force is hopeless! I must try fraud!
Well?
VENDALE. Well, the latest letter wishes me to send your
house the forged receipt to compare it with writing in
their hands. It is wished that I must keep the whole pro-
ceedings a profound secret from everybody.
OBENREIZER. Not even excepting me! Well?
VENDALE. Not excepting. (Surprised.) Oh! not except-
ing you. They must have forgotten you.
OBENREIZER. They must have forgotten me. Then under
the circumstances I can hardly advise. Yet why not take
it yourself. Nothing could happen better. I am going
to Switzerland to-night.
VENDALE. And Marguerite?
OBENREIZER (gaily). Oh! come to the house and dine with
us at seven. We can go off at once by the mail-train
to-night. Is it agreed?
VENDALE. By the mail-train to-night?
OBENREIZER. Ah! well (looking at watch) at seven! (up R.
at D. in F.)
VENDALE. At seven to-night.
JOEY (enters R. 1 E.). I will take your luggage for you to
Mr. Openrazor's house.
VEDALE. You have been listening, Joey?
JOEY. Not listening, Master George, but I heard every word
for all that.
JOEY. OBENREIZER, D. in F. VENDALE.
R. R. c. c.
SCENE II. — Room in WILDING'S house — enter, L., SALLY
and JOEY.
SALLY (c.). Mr. Joey, why do you follow me about into my
part of the house?
NO THOROUGHFARE 493
SC. II J
JOEY. Miss Goldstraw, if you was to go down into the cellars
I 'd follow you there with the greatest pleasure.
SALLY. But why do you follow me at all?
JOEY. For the same reason that the first man followed the
first woman.
SALLY. Ay, but she led him all wrong afterwards, and I
don't want to lead you wrong, Mr. Joey.
JOEY. Then there's another reason: I want to see you
change your name, which if Goldstraw is good, to Ladle,
which is better! That was well said, I think!
SALLY. Well, I never ! Is it you of all men that would want
me to change the name of the firm? What next, I won-
der?
JOEY. Woman is not the firm. (Putting arm round SALLY'S
waist. )
SALLY. Do you speak with your arm, Mr. Joey, and do
you think I listen with my waist? (Puts his arm away.)
JOEY. Then there 's another thing, Miss Goldstraw. I want
you to bring back the luck of the firm !
SALLY. Me ! you want me ? Why, bless your innocent soul,
I was the cause of all the trouble that has come into the
house. If it had not been for me, none of this would
have happened. If you, Joey, knew all, you would hate
me.
JOEY (shakes liead). If you brought the cross of luck, why,
that 's the very reason you should bring the good luck
home again. (Aside.) That was well said, I think!
SALLY. Why, what can I do, Mr. Joey? (Puts arm around
her.) Mr. Joey, may I ask, did you ever make love be-
fore ?
JOEY. Yes; but I never got as far as this.
SALLY (laughs). The idea of any man making love in an
apron like that !
JOEY (aside). She remarks my apron. Now, what follows
from her being in love with my apron? Why, that she
should be in love with me ! (Aloud.) You are at liberty,
Miss Goldstraw, to like any part of me, so long as you
like me. Now just let my arm speak to your waist a
little, while I tell you that I have something else besides
494 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT in
wapors in my head, I have. I would go on further with
the love-making but for that and my having to go to take
Mr. George's luggage to Mr. Openrazor's ; and in the state
of mind I am in, and with the spirit of prophecy strong
upon me, I don't know where I shall spend the night.
SALLY. Dear me! (Puts aside arm.) You'll excuse me,
Master Joey, but the institution of marriage is a serious
thing, and the more a man and a woman look at it in that
light before marriage, the better for the parties after-
wards ! [Exit D. in F.
JOEY. Beautiful language ! Let me turn that over in my
mind before I forget it ! The 'institution of a man and a
woman is a serious matter, and the sooner they look at it
in that light the better for all parties afterwards !'
{Exit L. 1 E. as lie speaks.
SCENE III. — Same as SCENE I., ACT II., discovering OBEN-
RKi/i.K at table, up L., packing travelling-bag, and put-
ting its strap round his neck, having pipe in his hand,
etc., MARGUERITE and VENDALE R. c. front.
VENDALE. I am all ready now, and going away.
MARGUERITE (aside to him). Must you go, George? Oh,
do not go !
VENDALE. It is business that compels me to go. I know the
parting must be hard, but I shall be back in a month.
MARGUERITE. It is not the parting, but you are going with
him. Have you done anything to offend Mr. Obenreizer?
VENDALE. I?
MARGUERITE. Hush ! You know the little photograph of
you I have. This afternoon it happened to be on the
mantelpiece, when he took it up, and I saw his face in the
glass. I know you have offended him ! He is merciless,
he is revengeful.
VENDALE. You are letting your fancy frighten you. Oben-
reizer and I were never better friends than at this moment.
MARGUERITE. Don't go, George, or go alone. It is near
NO THOROUGHFARE 495
SC. Ill]
seven. It will be too late in a few minutes. Change your
mind, George, change your mind!
JOEY enters, D. in F., and comes down R. to VENDALE,
to give him letter.
JOEY. A letter with a foreign postmark, Master George.
(Goes up to take trunk to L. by window, then by D. in p.,
waiting. )
VENDALE. From Neuchatel.
MARGUERITE. The journey is put off? (Hands clasped with
OBENREIZER (aside, coming down c.). The journey put off!
VENDALE (after reading). On the contrary. (Reads.)
'Dear Sir: I am called away by urgent business to Milan,
where I should prevail on you to meet me.' My journey
is not deferred, you see, but lengthened. (To OBEN-
REIZER.) In this wintry weather I cannot expect you to
accompany me on the additional route.
OBENREIZER. Why not? — Fellow-travellers, be it more or less
long. To Switzerland I would have gone with you; to
Milan you say now. Well, I will go with you to your
journey's end!
VENDALE. Thanks, my companion.
MARGUERITE (aside to VENDALE). Oh, George! look at his
smile now.
OBENREIZER (looks at his watch). Are you ready? Can
I take anything for you? You have no travelling-bag.
Here 's mine, with the compartment for papers, open at
your service. (To L. after this.)
VENDALE. Thank you. I have only one paper of importance
with me, and that paper I am bound to take charge of
myself. (Touching breast-pocket of coat.) Here it
must remain till we get to Milan. (Goes up c.) Joey,
change the address on my trunk. Joey goes L., frustrat-
ing OBENREIZER, who wanted to take up trunk, bringt
trunk to table, up c.) Milan, Joey. M-i-1-a-n, if you
don't know how to spell it.
JOEY (aside). I know how to spell more than that. Miss
Marguerite don't seem to like the idea of Master George
*96 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT iv
going on this journey with Mr. Openrazor no more than
I do. I 'd give something to know her mind on the sub-
ject. (Writes on label on trunk.)
OBENREIZER. Marguerite, adieu. My friend, en route, or
we '11 be too late for the mail train.
MARGUERITE (c.). George! (Embraces George.}
OBENREIZER. George, how precious you are to her! Don't
be alarmed ( half embraces VENDALE by the shoulders ) ; I
will take care of him. Come on (out D. in F. ).
MARGUERITE. George, George, George, don't go !
.VENDALE. I must.
(Voice of OBENREIZER off R. u. E.). Vendale!
VENDALE. I am coming.
(Voice of OBENREIZER). Vendale!
JOEY. He may come back.
VENDALE. Farewell, Marguerite. [Exit hastily p. in r.
MARGUERITE. Don't go. Ah ! gone in spite of all that I
could do! Oh, what is to be done?
JOEY (comes down R. c.). Miss Marguerite, the warning cf
danger's on you as it is on me?
MARGUERITE. Yes.
JOEY. Will you try to fend it off?
MARGUERITE. Yes. Joey, I am no fine lady ; I am one of
the people like you. I will go save him.
JOEY. And I will go with you ! I will go with you 1
CURTAIN
ACT IV
SCENE I. — Interior of Swiss Inn, discovering VENDALE R. by
fire, OBENREIZER over L. by table, pipe in hand.
VENDALE. How still it is in the night ! Is not that the
rustling of the waterfall that we hear?
OBENREIZER. Yes ! the waterfall on the slope of the moun-
tain. It sounds like the old waterfall at home that my
mother showed to travellers — if she was my mother!
NO THOROUGHFARE 497
sc. ij
VENDALE. If? Why do you say, if?
OBENREIZER. How do I know? I was very young and all
the rest of the family were men and women, and my so-
called parents were old enough to be — to be my ancestors !
Anything is possible in a case like mine.
VENDALE. Did you ever doubt —
OBENREIZER, Doubt? Everything!
VENDALE. At least you are Swiss?
OBENREIZER. How do I know? I say to you, at least you
are English. How do you know?
VENDALE. By what I have been told from infancy.
OBENREIZER (sneering). Ah! you know by what you have
been told from infancy ! I know of myself that way — it
must satisfy me ! While you sat on your mother's lap in
your father's carriage, rolling- through the rich English
streets all luxury surrounding you, I was a famished,
naked child among men and women with hard hand to
beat mel Bah! so ends my biography. But it is getting
cold here! You have let your fire go out! (To D. t» F.)
Halloa there! some wood! (To R. by table.)
Enter LANDLORD, with wood.
A drop of brandy will do neither of us any harm — we
have let our flasks get empty. (To LANDLORD.) A bot-
tle of brandy!
LANDLORD. Yes, gentlemen! [Exit D. in F.
VENDALE. I am afraid you will find it but bad brandy in such
a place. (To L. front, walking up and down.)
OBENREIZER. Bad brandy is better than none.
Enter LANDLORD, puts bottles on table.
LANDLORD. There, gentlemen.
OBENREIZER. Tres bien — well! You know you are to have
the guide ready.
LANDLORD. Yes, sir!
VENDALE. And you 're to wake us at four. (L. front.)
LANDLORD. Yes, sir!
OBENREIZER (doses glass and brings to VENDALE). Now for
the laudanum!
498 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT iv
LANDLORD. Any more orders, gentlemen?
OBENREIZER. No ! you can go to bed.
[Exit LANDLORD D. in F.
How is it? you are a better judge than I am; bad, eh?
VENDALE. I don't like the flavour.
OBENREIZER (carelessly). You don't like the flavour?
(Tastes brandy.) Pah ! how is it? bad ! Do you lock your
door at night when you are travelling? (Up R. by table.)
VENDALJE. Not I. I sleep too soundly. (Beginning to be
heavy of head. )
OBENREIZER. You are so sound a sleeper ! What a blessing !
VENDALE. Anything but a blessing to the east end of the
house if I had to be knocked up from the outside of my
door.
OBENREIZER. Ha ! ha ! I, too, leave open my door. By the
bye, let me advise you, as a Swiss, you know, always when
you travel in my country, put your papers — and, of course,
your money — under your pillow. (By bed, with illus-
trative gesture.) Always the safest place.
VENDALE. You are not complimentary to your countrymen.
OBENREIZER (shrugging shoulders). Ah! my countrymen
are like most men : they will take what they can get.
VENDALE. I have only one paper of importance, and I have
no fear of that.
OBENREIZER. But we have to be up early in the morning.
Your candle is burning low. I wish you good-night.
(Exit D. in F.) Under the pillow, you know.
VENDALE. Good-night. (Candle put out — crosses to L.
window. ) It 's a strange fellow-traveller I have. Pshaw !
he is my companion of his own proposal, and can have
no motive in snaring this undesirable journey. How cold
it is! (Turns from window, beginning to be unsteady of
foot.) I wonder what Wilding could have had to say to
him? Can Obenreizer be the — missing man! He speaks
English as if it had been the first language of his infancy.
How would I like this man to be rich? to be Marguerite's
guardian, and yet standing in no relationship to her?
(Abruptly.) But what are these considerations to come
between me and fidelity to the dead? (Crosses to R., reel-
NO THOROUGHFARE 499
sc. ij
ing.) No ! I am bent on the discharge of my solemn duty,
and that duty must and shall be performed. (Leans on
table.} I will speak to Obenreizer in the morning.
(Seated in chair, back to audience, R. side of table.) In
the morning. (Goes to sleep.)
Music to OBENREIZER'S entrance.
OBENREIZER opens D. in F., slowly, a little way, his hand
appears, then his face — pause — he enters — pause — he
closes door quickly, but so as not to make noise — pause
— he listens, goes cautiously to bed, knife in hand, puts
hand under pillow — pause — shakes his head, goes to
table, L., opens writing-case by springing the lock with
his knife. While opening case, puts knife in mouth to
overhaul papers, then lays knife on table; starts at
movement of VENDALE, snatches up knife, lays it down.
Finishes search, crosses to bed.
VENDALE. Who is it? (Springs up.)
OBENREIZER. Eh! (Intense surprise.) Oh! (Forced
voice of anxiety) you are not in bed — are you ill? (Up
R. c.)
VENDALE. What do you mean? (Hand to forehead.)
OBENREIZER. There is something wrong! You are not ill?
VENDALE. 111? No!
OBENREIZER. I have had a bad dream about you. I tried
to rest after it, but it was impossible. Ha ! ha ! I know
you will laugh at me. I was a long while waiting outside
your door before I came in. Ha ! ha ! ha ! It is so easy
to laugh at a dream that you have not dreamed! (Lights
candle, and then stands by table to light his pipe.) You
have a good fire here now. My candle has burnt out.
May I stop with you? You want to sleep, eh?
VENDALE (drowsily, to c. up). You can stop here, if you
like, till morning comes.
OBENREIZER. Yes — ha! ha! It was a bad dream. See! I
was stripped for a struggle!
VENDALE. And armed, too.
OBENREIZER (carelessly). This? Oh, a traveller's knife that
I always carry about me. (Plays with knife-handle.)
Do you carry no such thing?
500 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT IT
VENDAXE. No such thing. (R.)
OBENREIZER. No pistols?
VENDALE. No weapons of any kind. (Seated R. as before.)
OBENREIZER. You Englishmen are so confident. (To bed,
searching. )
VENDALE. Where are you?
OBENREIZER. You see where I am, dear boy. My candle
has burnt out. There 's such a little time yet, may I sit
here and keep you company?
VENDALE. If you like. Besides, I had something very im-
portant to say to you — about — (sleeping, wakes) I — I —
meant to put it off till the morning.
OBENREIZER. Now, it will relieve your mind. Something
about me?
VENDALE (sleepily). About you, yes — ah! — to-morrow! — to-
morrow! (Sleeps in chair.)
OBENREIZER. The laudanum has done its work at last. (To
bed, searches.) Not there! (Knife in hand, to table, L.)
Not here! (At writing-case.) He must have it on him.
(Crosses to R.) If I could take it without waking him —
without crime ! There he lies at my mercy ! Marguerite's
lover — my rival — who carries more than my life in the
pocket of his coat. If that man goes free, I am ruined!
(Bends over VENDALE, knife in right hand, searching him
with left.) It is here. Could I but unbutton his coat!
(Loud knock D. in F. OBENREIZER leaps back, and con-
ceals knife; lights his pipe.)
VENDALE (jumps up). Come in. (Bewildered.)
OBENREIZER (aside). Another moment, and I — (Sheathes
knife. )
LANDORD enters D. in F. Lights up.
LANDLORD. Four o'clock, gentlemen, and the guides are
waiting. (Helps VENDALE, sleepy, on with overcoat, L.)
OBENREIZER (dresses himself with his clothes brought in by
servant — aside). It is my fate. I must kill him on the
road! (All go up to D. in F.)
(Scene closes in.)
NO THOROUGHFARE 501
SC* II J
SCENE II. — Exterior of Inn on 1 G.
Enter, D. in r., JEAX PAUL and JEAN MARIE and LANDLORD.
LANDLORD (L.). Well, my friends, what do you think of the
weather now?
JEAN MARIE (c.). I say the weather will do.
JEAN PAUL (R.). I say that it is bad.
LANDLORD. Come, you must make up your mind. The two
gentlemen are coming.
Enter, D. in F., VENDALE and OBENREIZER.
VENDALE (to L. c.). Well, I suppose you have explained to
the men? Are you ready to cross the mountain?
JEAN MARIE. I don't care, for one.
LANDLORD. You may depend upon these guides, sirs.
OBENREIZER (aside). That won't do.
JEAN PAUL. I say no. There 's something in the air that
looks like snow.
OBENREIZER (aside). That 's better.
JEAN MARIE. I won't go unless Jean Paul goes.
JEAN PAUL. And I '11 not go at all.
OBENREIZER (to VENDALE). I suppose you know what all
this means?
VENDALE. Indeed, I do not.
OBENREIZER. Part of the trade of the poor devils : — it 's to
double their pay.
JEAN PAUL. You heard the rushing of the waterfall last
night? Snow! You heard an unseen hand try to open
the doors? Snow. You heard the far-off thunder?
Snow. Yes, you '11 have snow enough to bury a man up-
right, and wind enough to blow the hair off his head ! And
that won't be long from this; — it will all be before to-
night.
OBENREIZER. Part of the profession. Two napoleons will
change you.
JEAN PAUL. No ! not two thousand would do it.
OBENREIZER (aside). He will not go!
JEAN PAUL (to VENDALE leading him to *. 1 £.). You do
502 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT iv
not laugh at the guide. Mark ! How many peaks do you
see?
VENDALE. Two!
JEAN PAUL. There are three !
VENDALE. Why can't I see the other?
JEAN PAUL. Because the storm cloud has already come down
upon it. It will bring down tons and tons of snow, which
will not only strike you dead but bury you at a blow. Do
as you will now. I have done my duty of warning you,
and I wash my hands of it.
JEAN MARIE. I '11 not go unless the old man will.
LANDLORD. We '11 do our best to make you comfortable in
the inn, gentlemen.
OBENREIZER. Well, what do you propose? As Shakespeare
says, 'Discretion is the better part of valour!' Or will
you take my advice? I am mountain-bom, and we would
only have had to guide those poor devils of guides. If
you dare to make the attempt, I will go with you —
VENDALE. The occasion is pressing! I must cross —
OBENREIZER. Yes. It is well to understand one another —
friends all. This gentleman —
VENDALE. Must cross.
OBENREIZER. It is settled. We go !
VENDALE. We go! (They take sticks from guides.)
JEAN PAUL. Do not rush upon destruction.
OBENREIZER. Never fear! [Exit R. with VENDALE.
JEAN MARIE. Stop ! here ! stop, stop !
LANDLORD ( to R.). Hi, hi ! mind you keep the track ! Don't
leave the track !
JEAN PAUL. You need not waste your breath. You have
seen the last of them.
LANDLORD. Pooh ! they are two stout walkers, and one knows
the mountains.
JEAN PAUL. That may be, but they are both dead men !
(To L.)
LANDLORD. We shall see ! [Exit D. in F.
JEAN PAUL. Come, brother, we must be on our way.
[Exit L., with JEAN MARIE.
Thunder distant. — Scene changes.
BC. ml ~ """ oOo
SCENE III. — Mountain pass — tlwnder — VENDALE discovered
c. front, OBENREIZER up R. on stairs, staves in hand.
VENDALE. Is it here that we strike the path again?
OBENREIZER. Yes, the track is here again.
VENDALE. The snow seems to have passed over.
OBENREIZER. The storm will come again!
VENDALE. Let us on.
OBENREIZER. No.
VENDALE. No? why linger here?
OBENREIZER. Because we are at the journey's end.
VENDALE. Here! how here?
OBENREIZER. I promised to guide you to your journey* <.nd!
The journey of your life ends here!
VENDALE. You are a villain !
OBENREIZER. You are a fool ! I have drugged you ! Doubly
a fool, for I am the thief and forger, and in a few mo-
ments shall take the proof from your dead body !
VENDALE. What have I done to you? (c.)
OBENREIZER (R. c.). Done! You would have destroyed me,
but that you have come to your journey's end. You
have made me what I am ! I took that money — I stole it,
to give luxury to Marguerite ! You made me buy the
jewels that should outshine your gift! You made me
lose her love — you would have made me lose my liberty
and life! Therefore you die!
VENDALE. Stand back, murderer!
OBENREIZER (laughs.) Murderer! why, I don't touch you!
I need not, to make you die! Any sleep in the snow is
death. You are sleeping as you stand!
VENDALE (violently). Stand back, base murderer! (Lift*
up his staff, OBENREIZER standing on guard with his staff.)
Stand back! (Lets staff fall, when OBENREIZER rakes it
over to him and throws it off, R.) God bless my Mar-
guerite! May she never know how I died! Stand off
from me — yet let me look at your murderous face. Let
it remind me — of something — left to me to say — the secret
must not die with me — no, no, no! Obenreizcr, I must
say one thing— before I sink in death. Oh! (Reeling.)
504 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT v
OBEXREIZER (aside). My courage fails me! (Advances,
knife in hand.) Give me the paper, or —
VENDALE. Never! (Rushes up set bank to trap, leaps.)
Never !
OBENREIZER (pauses on bank). Lost! (Staggers down to
stage.) Lost! the — the paper. (Falling.) Ah! (Falls
in dead swoon, c. front.)
Music kept up — pause — enter R. u. E. by set stage, MAR-
GUERITE, JOEY, and the two Guides.
MARGUERITE. Ah, George! (Comes to c., then throws her-
self on bank, looking over. Music.)
All form picture.
Two Guides. JOEY. MARGUERITE. OBENREIZEB.
E. R. c. c.
CURTAIN
ACT V.
SCENE. — Interior in Monastery, discovering JOEY c., a
little up, and BINTRY beside him.
BIN TRY. What next, I wonder? Here 's an adventure for a
professional man. I 've been rattled across the country
in the railway, dragged up the mountains on mule-back,
and popped into a monastery by a monk ! This all comes
of you, Master Joey !
JOEY. How do you make that out, sir?
BINTRY. Why, could Miss Marguerite have sent for me if
you had not brought her out here, and would she have
come out if you had not brought her? It 's all her fault
and yours.
JOEY. If it comes to that, Mr. Bintry, would Master George
be living at this moment if we had not been in time to save
him on the mountains?
NO THOROUGHFARE 505
ACT V]
BINTEY. Is Mr. Obenreizer mixed up in any way in this
affair?
JOEY. We found him lying in the snow by the edge of the
precipice, if that 's what you call being mixed up with it !
BIXTRY. Dead?
JOEY. In a dead swoon !
BINTRY. Did you remark anything?
JOEY. I remarked nothing. At first, I thought Master
George was dead. When I felt of his heart, there was
no beat ; but my fingers were so numbed with the cold that
perhaps I felt on the wrong side!
BINTRY. You don't comprehend what I am driving at. When
will Mr. Vendale be able to travel?
JOEY. He is able to travel now.
BINTRY. And when will Miss Marguerite be able to travel?
JOEY. Just so soon as Mr. Vendale is ready to travel, and
not before. (Exchanges glances with BINTRY, and both
laugh. )
BINTRY. I see, I see. You mean when they do go out, their
first walk will be to the nearest church?
JOEY. That is about the figure of it, sir.
BINTRY. So far, all is clear. But the rest is not so plain.
Now, where is Mr. Vendale?
JOEY. Here! in this convent, where the monks brought us
after they had picked us up.
BINTRY. Here with Mr. Obenreizer?
JOEY. But they have not seen one another yet.
BINTRY. What does Mr. Obenreizer say about his ward com-
ing out?
JOEY. They have not met either. They keep the men and
women apart here, sir.
BINTRY. Has Mr. Vendale said nothing out of the common?
JOEY. No.
BINTRY. Not in any way?
JOEY He will not speak. He has something on his mind.
BINTRY. Ah ! then it is he who sent for me by Miss Mar-
guerite ?
JOEY. Then Mr. Vendale will see you at once.
BINTRY. I will go at once.
506 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT V
JOEY (stops him). If you '11 excuse me, sir, may I ask you
one question first?
BINTRY. Certainly, as you please !
JOEY. When you left London, how did you leave that
precious woman, Miss Goldstraw?
BINTRY. Leave her? I didn't leave her! Mr. Joey, prepare
yourself for a great surprise. When Miss Goldstraw
heard that Miss Marguerite had come out here after Mr.
Vendale, she said she must go into foreign parts as well.
And it 's my firm belief, Master Joey, that you are at the
bottom of it all!
JOEY (chuckling.) Not a doubt on it, sir, not a doubt on it!
BINTRY. Why, he don't seem surprised at all !
JOEY. Why, I knew all along that if I didn't go back to her,
she 'd come all the way out to me.
BINTRY. Is that your experience of woman, Master Joey?
JOEY. That 's my experience of Sarah Goldstraw, sir. Now,
what was the beautiful language that she used the last
time I saw her? It went this way: 'The separation of a
man and a woman is a serious institution, and the sooner
they come together again after it, the better for all par-
ties.' There 's language ! Now, what follows ? Why, if
Miss Goldstraw has come out to see me, it 's all right — all
right.
Enter SALLY, R. 1 E. D. to c., up.
SALLY. If you think I have come here on account of you, I
will go back to London again directly !
BINTRY. For that purpose, allow me to offer you my arm,
ma'am. (SALLY takes his arm.)
JOEY. Just allow me one moment before you walk her off!
BINTRY. Certainly, certainly.
JOEY. There 's going to be two marriages. Now, if Mr.
Vendale marries Miss Marguerite, who is to marry Miss
Goldstraw ?
SALLY. Don't distress yourself on my account.
JOEY (firmly). Who is to marry Miss Goldstraw?
BINTRY. Well, you are, I am afraid.
JOEY. Then why are you walking off with her, instead of
me?
NO THOROUGHFARE 507
ACT Vj
SALLY. You wait a little and you will be walking off along
with me all the rest of your future existence.
BINTRY. Isn't it enough to monopolise your wife after mar-
riage, and not to want to monopolise her before she is vour
• /» «\ *7
wife?
SALLY. Mr. Joey, I 'd like you to remember this : A man had
better not give a woman the chance, or it may end in her
leaving him at the church door ! [Exit D. in F.
JOEY (aside). Beautiful language!
Enter D. in F., FATHER FRANCIS, with book, and OBENREIZER
tenth bag of money, to table R., where they put them
down. FATHER FRANCIS crosses to L. to shake BINTRY'S
hand, BINTRY looking at him through eye-glass.
BINTRY (aside). Mr. Obenreizer turned treasurer of the es-
tablishment !
OBENREIZER (to BINTRY, who receives Mm suspiciously).
You have arrived safely — so glad ! ( Shakes hands. )
Come to see Mr. Vendale? Make your mind perfectly
easy; our old friend is as good a man as ever. (Subdued
tone.) You have come on business, I suppose?
BINTRY. Humph ! that ?s impossible to say until I shall have
seen Mr. Vendale.
OBENREIZER. I shared his perils as his fellow-traveller, and
yet I have not seen him yet.
FATHER FRANCIS. You shared his perils, and your sight will
remind him of his perils. This gentleman will remind him
of home, and can see him at once.
JOEY. I '11 show you the way, sir. (At L. D.)
BINTRY. All right, Joey ; I '11 follow you at once.
[Exit JOEY L. D., BINTRY to R., to OBENREIZER, tnujf-
box business. Exit quickly, L. D.
OBENREIZER (aside). Why has he come here? What can
Vendale have to say to him?
FATHER FRANCIS. Patience, my son; before the night you
shall take the hand of your friend. (At table.) Till
then you must endure, for a little longer, my poor com-
pany. '
508 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT v
OBENREIZER. There is none I could desire better, father.
Ah ! pardon me ! where does that door ( L. D. in F. ) lead to ?
FATHER FRANCIS. Why do you ask?
OBENREIZER. That door puzzles me the more I look at it.
No bolt, no bar, no lock. When I go nearer and listen,
I hear something going 'tick, tick,' like the ticking of a
clock.
FATHER FRANCIS. It is a clock in the room.
OBENREIZER. A room there? (Examines thickness of wall
by R. D. in F.)
FATHER FRANCIS (nods). The door opens by clockwork.
One of our brothers made it after long laborious years.
It is the strongest strong-room in the world. Nothing
can move the door till the time comes, and it opens of itself.
OBENREIZER. A strong-room here ! Now, if you were bank-
ers or jewellers, I could understand the need.
FRANCIS. Are we not bankers of the poor, my son?
OBENREIZER. Oh!
FRANCIS. Then we have to keep our valuables safe.
OBENREIZER. Oh 1 rare old manuscripts and relics. (Laugh'-
ing.)
FRANCIS. Hush, my son, I speak seriously. The property
of the travellers who have perished on the mountain is
preserved by us until claimed.
OBENREIZER (laughs). What a quantity of waste paper you
must have!
FRANCIS. Not so; sooner or later all is claimed.
OBENREIZER. Both by foreigners and natives?
FRANCIS. At the present time we have but one foreign : the
Vendale papers (OBENREIZER starts) found on an Eng-
lishman in the snow.
OBENREIZER (aside). The Vendale — (Checks himself.) Ah!
Enter, D. in F., staying there, Monk.
MONK. The young English lady desires to speak to you,
father.
FRANCIS. Presently, brother, presently. (Exit Monk D. in
P.) I must put away the money and wait to set the clock.
The English travellers will be on the road early. I will
NO THOROUGHFARE 509
ACT V]
make it to open at one o'clock. (To OBENREIZER.) We
keep regular hours here, and do not often have occasion
to alter the hour of the safe's opening.
OBENREIZER (looks at watch). It is now a minute to eight.
(R. c. up.)
FRANCIS. Then in one minute you will see that door open.
(R.) (Music, piano, long-drawn strains on violin — clock
strikes eight, L. door m F. opens, FRANCIS pushes it back
so as not to close, then to table.)
OBENREIZER. Wonderful!
FRANCIS. So simple, too, in its action. Now, to change the
hour. (Alters the liand.) At any hour, or part of an
hour, that the regulator is fixed, the safe will open.
(To R.)
OBENREIZER (to R.). I see. Don't trouble yourself, father.
May I assist you? (Takes bag of money, puts it in L.
room, turns dial hand around, closes door with snap, stands
back to it.) Oh! (Pretends to snatch at door.)
FRANCIS. What have you done?
OBENREIZER. My stupidity is inexcusable! I — I leaned
against the door and — and —
FRANCIS. You have closed it! (With vexation of a man
who has learnt to suppress emotion pretty well.) Now it
will not open till six to-morrow morning.
OBENREIZER (aside). It will open in five minutes!
FRANCIS. And my book is left out ! Oh, you have caused me
excessive trouble!
OBENREIZER. I am so sorry, father.
FRANCIS. The book makes no matter, but the — well, I must
go see the young lady. [Exit R. D. in F.
OBENREIZER. Ah ! the old idiot. How fortunate it was put
in his keeping. (Watch in hand.) There's not a min-
ute to be lost. Ah! the door opens! (Music, L. D. inr.
opens as before, overhauls papers.) This is not it. Not
here, not here! I know the receipt well! What is this?
Vendale papers! (To table, runs over packet.) It is not
among them. Bah! Eighteen hundred— twenty-nine
years -ago! (Interested.) What does all this mean?
Certificate of death! a mother— and not a wife! Ah! ah.
510 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT v
I have him! (Rises, puts paper in breast.) Ah, Mr.
Vendale, I am prepared to meet you now! (Closes L. D.
in F., to L.)
Enter MARGUERITE, R. D., VENDALE D. in p., they embrace.
OBENREIZER. Marguerite (to R. c.), have you no word for
me?
VENDALE (keeping MARGUERITE L. c. front). Pardon
me, Mr. Obenreizer, you will understand that you can have
no further interest in this lady.
OBENREIZER. Marguerite, what does this mean? Mr. Vendale
speaks in such a tone that I cannot tell whether he is in
jest or earnest.
VENDALE. Do not answer. (To OBENREIZER.) There can
be no question between us. My object in so far meeting
you is to bring all further proceedings on your part to
an end. Mr. Bintry will tell you how.
OBENREIZER. Marguerite, I hardly need to repeat in what
position I stand towards you. That man has no claim
on you — when I leave the house, you come with me.
BINTRY (at R. table, R. side of it). Mr. Obenreizer, when
you are ready, I am. Will you sign the paper by which
you relinquish all authority over your niece and leave her
free to wed Mr. Vendale?
OBENREIZER (c.) Mr. Bintry, your professional enthusiasm
leads you too far, clever as you are. Mr. Vendale and
I made an agreement under which he was bound to double
his income. (To VENDALE.) Have you doubled it?
VENDALE. No!
OBENREIZER. Then, more talk is useless. Mr. Bintry, you
can put your paper in the fire.
BINTRY. My paper will get the better of you yet !
VENDALE. I will force you to sign it.
OBENREIZER. Force me! force is a very big word, Mr. Ven-
dale. I beg you to withdraw it. Mr. Bintry, you are fond
of curious documents ; will you be so good as to look at
these?
BINTRY. What? (Take* papers.) Impossible!
OBENREIZER. I told you so. Three years ago an English
NO THOROUGHFARE 511
ACT VJ
gentleman perished on the mountains, and the papers found
on his body were brought here.
VENDALE. How did you come by them?
BINTRY. That is needless to inquire. (Examining papers
eagerly.)
OBENREIZER. Twenty-five years ago, a lady living in
Switzerland, childless for years, decided on adopting a
child, and her sister in England took one out of the
Foundling Hospital!
VENDALE. Out of the Foundling!
MARGUERITE. Oh, George, what is this?
OBENREIZER. You shall all have information enough! Here
are the written proofs of what I advance. Mr. Bintry,
what do you want else?
BINTRY. Proof that the father and mother are living?
OBENREIZER (gives papers). They are both dead.
BINTRY. List of the witnesses and their residences who can
speak to the facts of the case?
OBENREIZER (gives papers). Are they right?
BINTRY. Complete!
OBENREIZER. Ha, ha!
BINTRY (to VENDALE). Mr. Vendale, allow me to congratu-
late you!
VENDALE (bewildered). What was the name of the woman
in England?
OBENREIZER. Mrs. Miller.
VENDALE. Miller! then we have found the missing man!
MARGUERITE. What does all this mean?
VENDALE. Our poor dead friend's last wish on earth is ac-
complished. All is explained now. (To OBENREIZER.)
You are the lost Walter Wilding !
OBENREIZER. I — I have not that honour. You are the man !
Marguerite, do you know to whom you would have given
your hand? To an impostor — a bastard! brought up
by public charity !
MARGUERITE. Oh, I never loved you, George, as I love you
now !
VENDALE. I the man!
BINTRY. Yes! Ah, ah, Mr. Obenreizer, he is the man who
512 NO THOROUGHFARE
[ACT v
inherits all the fortune of Mr. Wilding. In one breath
he has doubled his income, thanks entirely to your exer-
tions. By your own agreement he is free to marry her
now. Will you sign the paper? (R. at table.}
OBENREIZER (fiercely). Never! never!
VENDALE. Then I must force you.
OBENREIZER. Force me!
VENDALE (shews paper). What becomes of your authority
over her now?
BINTRY. Will you sign?
OBENREIZER (to VENDALE softly). Does she know?
VENDALE (same, aside). She does not.
OBENREIZER (aside to VENDALE). Will she ever know, if I
sign?
VENDALE (to table, R., to burn receipt m candle}. Never!
BINTRY. I told you my paper would get the better of you at
last. (Points out place to sign.}
OBENREIZER (signs while VENDALE burns receipt — aside).
So ends the dream of my life! (Swallows poison from
vial.)
MARGUERITE. What does all this mean?
OBENREIZER. It means that you are free — free to marry him !
MARGUERITE. Free! (To VENDALE, L. c.) I don't know
what feeling prompts me to do this. (Approaches OBEN-
REIZER, c. front.) I am going to begin a new and happy
life. If I have ever done you wrong, forgive me! If
you have ever done me wrong, for George's sake, I forgive
you. Ah! you are ill!
OBENREIZER (sadly taking' MARGUERITE'S hand). Mar-
guerite, you said once I frightened you ! Do I frighten
you now?
MARGUERITE. What is the matter? You are looking ill.
OBENREIZER. I am looking at you for the last time, Mar-
guerite! (Staggers up c., when VENDALE tries to catch
him — fiercely.) Don't touch me! (Drops his voice,
mildly.) No, I— Thanks ! Farewell! (Dies.)
MARGUERITE (£o VENDALE). George!
JOEY and SALLY enter D. in F., look down at OBENREIZEB.
CURTAIN
POEMS
SONGS FROM 'THE PICKWICK PAPERS'
[1837]
I.— THE IVY GREEN
THIS famous ballad of three verses, from the sixth chapter of
Pickwick, is perhaps the most acceptable of all Dickens's poetical
efforts. It was originally set to music, at Dickens's request, by
his brother-in-law, Henry Burnett, a professional vocalist, who,
by the way, was the admitted prototype of Nicholas Nickleby.
Mr. Burnett sang the ballad scores of times in the presence of
literary men and artists, and it proved an especial favourite with
Landor. 'The Ivy Green' was not written for Pickwick, Mr.
Burnett assured me; but on its being so much admired the
author said it should go into a monthly number, and it did. The
most popular setting is undoubtedly that of Henry Russell, who
has recorded that he received, as his fee, the magnificent sum of
ten shillings ! The ballad, in this form, went into many editions,
and the sales must have amounted to tens of thousands. — F. G. K.
OH, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,
That creepeth o'er ruins old!
* Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,
In his cell so lone and cold.
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,
To pleasure his dainty whim:
And the mouldering dust that years have made
Is a merry meal for him.
Creeping where no life is seen,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,
And a staunch old heart has he.
How closely he twineth, how tight he clings,
To his friend the huge Oak Tree !
And slily he traileth along the ground,
515
516 POEMS
And his leaves he gently waves,
As he joyously hugs and crawleth round
The rich mould of dead men's graves.
Creeping where grim death hath been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
Whole ages have fled and their works decayed,
And nations have scattered been ;
But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,
From its hale and hearty green.
The brave old plant, in its lonely days,
Shall fatten upon the past:
For the stateliest building man can raise
Is the Ivy's food at last.
Creeping on, where time has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
II.— A CHRISTMAS CAROL
THB five stanzas bearing the above title will be found in the
twenty-eighth chapter of Pickwick, where they are introduced
as the song which that hospitable old soul, Mr. Wardle, sung
appropriately, 'in a good, round, sturdy voice/ before the Pick-
wickians and others assembled on Christmas Eve at Manor Farm.
The 'Carol,' shortly after its appearance in Pickwick, was set to
music to the air of 'Old King Cole,' and published in The Book
of British Song (New Edition), with an illustration drawn by
'Alfred Crowquill' — i.e., A. H. Forrester. — F. G. K.
I CARE not for Spring; on his fickle wing
Let the blossoms and buds be borne:
He woos them amain with his treacherous rain,
And he scatters them ere the morn.
An inconstant elf, he knows not himself
Nor his own changing mind an hour,
He '11 smile in your face, and, with wry grimace,
He '11 wither your youngest flower.
Let the Summer sun to his bright home run,
He shall never be sought by me ;
GABRIEL GRUB'S SONG 517
When he 's dimmed by a cloud I can laugh aloud,
And care not how sulky he be!
For his darling child is the madness wild
That sports in fierce fever's train;
And when love is too strong, it don't last long,
As many have found to their pain.
A mild harvest night, by the tranquil light
Of the modest and gentle moon,
Has a far sweeter sheen, for me, I ween,
Than the broad and unblushing noon.
But every leaf awakens my grief,
As it lieth beneath the tree;
So let Autumn air be never so fair,
It by no means agrees with me.
But my song I troll out, for CHRISTMAS stout,
The hearty, the true, and the bold ;
A bumper I drain, and with might and main
Give three cheers for this Christmas old!
We '11 usher him in with a merry din
That shall gladden his joyous heart,
And we '11 keep him up, while there 's bite or sup,
And in fellowship good, we '11 part.
In his fine honest pride, he scorns to hide
One jot of his hard-weather scars;
They 're no disgrace, for there 's much the same trac
On the cheeks of our bravest tars.
Then again I sing 'till the roof doth ring,
And it echoes from wall to wall —
To the stout old wight, fair welcome to-night,
As the King of the Seasons all !
III.— GABRIEL GRUB'S SONG
THE Sexton's melancholy dirge, in the twenty-ninth chapter ol
Pickwick, seems a little incongruous in a humorous work. The
sentiment, however, thoroughly accords with the philosophic
gravedigger's gruesome occupation. 'The Story of the Goblins
518 POEMS
who Stole a Sexton' is one of several short tales (chiefly of a
dismal character) introduced into Pickwick; they were doubtless
written prior to the conception of Pickwick, each being probably
intended for independent publication, and in a manner similar
to the 'Boz' Sketches. For some reason these stories were not so
published, and Dickens evidently saw a favourable opportunity
of utilising his unused manuscripts by inserting them in The
Pickwick Papers. — F. G. K.
BEAVE lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one,
A few feet of cold earth, when life is done;
A stone at the head, a stone at the feet,
A rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat;
Rank grass over head, and damp clay around,
Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground 1
IV.— ROMANCE
IT will be remembered that while Sam Weller and his coaching-
friends refreshed themselves at the little public-house opposite
the Insolvent Court in Portugal Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields,
prior to Sam joining Mr. Pickwick in the Fleet, that faithful
body-servant was persuaded to 'oblige the company' with a song.
'Raly, gentlemen,' said Sam, 'I'm not wery much in the habit o'
singin' vithout the instrument; but anythin' for a quiet life, as
the man said ven he took the sitivation at the light-house.'
'With this prelude, Mr. Samuel Weller burst at once into the
following wild and beautiful legend, which, under the impression
that it is not generally known, we take the liberty of quoting.
We would beg to call particular attention to the monosyllable at
the end of the second and fourth lines, which not only enables
the singer to take breath at those points, but greatly assists the
metre.' — The Pickwick Papers, chapter xliii.
At the conclusion of the performance the mottled-faced gentle-
man contended that the song was 'personal to the cloth/ and de-
manded the name of the bishop's coachman, whose cowardice he
regarded as a reflection upon coachmen in general. Sam replied
that his name was not known, as 'he hadn't got his card in his
pocket'; whereupon the mottled-faced gentleman declared the
statement to be untrue, stoutly maintaining that the said coach-
man did not run away, but 'died game — game as pheasants,' and
he would 'hear nothin' said to the contrairey.'
ROMANCE 519
Even in the vernacular (observes Mr. Percy Fitzgerald), 'this
master of words [Charles Dickens] could be artistic; and it may
fairly be asserted that Mr. Weller's song to the coachmen is supe-
rior to anything of the kind that has appeared since.' The two
stanzas have been set to music, as a humorous part-song, by
Sir Frederick Bridge, Mus. Doc., M.V.O., the organist of West-
minster Abbey, who informs me that it was written some years
since, to celebrate a festive gathering in honour of Dr. Turpin
(!), Secretary of the College of Organists. 'It has had a very
great success/ says Sir Frederick, 'and is sung much in the North
of England at competitions of choirs. It is for men's voices.
The humour of the words never fails to make a great hit, and I
hope the music does no harm. "The Bishop's Coach" is set to a
bit of old Plain-Chant, and I introduce a Fugue at the words
"Sure as eggs is eggs." ' — F. G. K.
BOLD Turpin vunce, on Hounslow Heath,
His bold mare Bess bestrode — er;
Yen there he see'd the Bishop's coach
A-comin' along the road — er.
So he gallops close to the 'orse's legs,
And he claps his head vithin ;
And the Bishop says, 'Sure as eggs is eggs,
This here 's the bold Turpin !'
Chorus — And the Bishop says, 'Sure as eggs is eggs,
This here 's the bold Turpin !'
II
Says Turpin, 'You shall eat your words,
With a sarse of leaden bttl-let';
So he puts a pistol to his mouth,
And he fires it down his gul-let.
The coachman, he not likin' the job,
Set off at a full gal-lop,
But Dick put a couple of balls in his nob,
And perwailed on him to stop.
Chorus (sarcastically)—^ Dick put a couple of
balls in his nob,
And perwailed on him to stop.
520 POEMS
POLITICAL SQUIBS FROM
'THE EXAMINER'
IN August 1841 Dickens contributed anonymously to The Ex-
aminer (then edited by Forster) three political squibs, which
were signed W., and were intended to help the Liberals in fight-
ing their opponents. These squibs were entitled respectively
'The Fine Old English Gentleman (to be said or sung at all
Conservative Dinners)'; 'The Quack Doctor's Proclamation'; and
'Subjects for Painters (after Peter Pindar).' Concerning those
productions, Forster says: 'I doubt if he ever enjoyed anything
more than the power of thus taking part occasionally, unknown
to outsiders, in the sharp conflict the pr^ss was waging at the
time.' In all probability he contributed other political rhymes
to the pages of The Examiner as events prompted : if so, they are
buried beyond easy reach of identification.
Writing to Forster at this time, Dickens said: 'By Jove, how
Radical I am getting! I wax stronger and stronger in the true
principles every day/ . . . He would (observes Forster)
sometimes even talk, in moments of sudden indignation at the
political outlook, 'of carrying off himself and his household gods,
like Coriolanus, to a world elsewhere.' This was the period of
the Tory interregnum, with Sir Robert Peel at the head of affairs.
— F. G. K.
I.— THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN
NEW VERSION
y'To be said or sung at all Conservative D'mners)
I 'I/L sing you a new ballad, and I '11 warrant it first-rate,
Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate ;
When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate
On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again !
The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips,
and chains,
POLITICAL SQUIBS 521
With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains,
With rebel heads, and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins ;
For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains
Of the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
This brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful
eyes,
And ev'ry English peasant had his good old English spies,
To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies,
Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop his peevish cries,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in
their need,
The good old times for hunting men who held their fathers'
creed,
The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men
agreed,
Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad
speed.
Oh the fine old English Tory times;
When will they come again!
In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or
bark,
But sweetly sang of men in pow'r, like any tuneful lark ;
Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;
And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.
Oh the fine old English Tory times ;
Soon may they come again !
Those were the days for taxes, and for war's infernal din ;
For scarcity of bread, that fine old dowagers might win ;
For shutting men of letters up, through iron bars to grin,
Because they didn't think the Prince was altogether thin,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
522 POEMS
But Tolerance, though slow in flight, is strong-wing'd in
the main ;
That night must come on these fine days, in course of time
was plain ;
The pure old spirit struggled, but its struggles were in vain ;
A nation's grip was on it, and it died in choking pain,
With the fine old English Tory days,
All of the olden time.
The bright old day now dawns again ; the cry runs through
the land,
In England there shall be dear bread — in Ireland, sword and
brand ;
And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand,
So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand,
Of the fine old English Tory days ;
Hail to the coming time! W.
II.— THE QUACK DOCTOR'S PROCLAMATION
TUNE — 'A COBBLER THERE WAS'
AN astonishing doctor has just come to town,
Who will do all the faculty perfectly brown:
He knows all diseases, their causes, and ends;
And he begs to appeal to his medical friends.
Tol de rol:
Diddle doll:
Tol de rol, de dol,
Diddle doll
Tol de rol doll.
He *s a magnetic doctor, and knows how to keep
The whole of a Government snoring asleep
To popular clamours ; till popular pins
Are stuck in their midriffs — and then he begins
Tol de rol.
He 's a clairvoyant subject, and readily reads
His countrymen's wishes, condition, and needs,
THE QUACK DOCTOR 523
With many more fine things I can't tell in rhyme,
—And he keeps both his eyes shut the whole of the time.
Tol de rol.
You mustn't expect him to talk : but you '11 take
Most particular notice the doctor 's awake,
Though for aught from his words or his looks that you
reap, he
Might just as well be most confoundedly sleepy
Tol de rol.
Homoeopathy, too, he has practised for ages
(You '11 find his prescriptions in Luke Hansard's pages),
Just giving his patient when maddened by pain, —
Of Reform the ten thousandth part of a grain.
Tol de rol.
He 's a med'cine for Ireland, in portable papers ;
The infallible cure for political vapours;
A neat label round it his 'prentices tie —
Tut your trust in the Lord, and keep this powder dry !'
Tol de rol.
He's a corn doctor also, of wonderful skill,
— No cutting, no rooting-up, purging, or pill —
You 're merely to take, 'stead of walking or riding,
The sweet schoolboy exercise — innocent sliding.
Tol de rol.
There 's no advice gratis. If high ladies send
His legitimate fee, he 's their soft-spoken friend.
At the great public counter with one hand behind him,
And one in his waistcoat, they 're certain to find him.
Tol de rol.
He has only to add he 's the real Doctor Flam,
All others being purely fictitious and sham;
The house is a large one, tall, slated, and white,
With a lobby ; and lights in the passage at night.
524 POEMS
Tol de rol :
Diddle doll:
Tol de rol, de dol,
Diddle doll
Tol de rol doll. W.
III.— SUBJECTS FOR PAINTERS
(AFTER PETER PINDAR)
To you, SIR MARTINA and your co. R.A.'s,
I dedicate in meek, suggestive lays,
Some subjects for your academic palettes;
Hoping by dint of these my scanty jobs,
To fill with novel thoughts your teeming nobs,
As though I beat them in with wooden mallets.
To you, MACUSE, who Eve's fair daughters paint
With Nature's hand, and want the maudlin taint
Of the sweet Chalon school of silk and ermine:
To you, E. LANDSEER, who from year to year
Delight in beasts and birds, and dogs and deer,
And seldom give us any human vermin:
— To all who practise art, or make believe,
I offer subjects they may take or leave.
Great Sibthorp and his butler, in debate
(Arcades ambo) on affairs of state,
Not altogether 'gone,' but rather funny ;
Cursing the Whigs for leaving in the lurch
Our d d good, pleasant, gentlemanly Church,
Would make a picture — cheap at any money.
Or Sibthorp as the Tory Sec. — at-War,
Encouraging his mates with loud 'Yhor ! Yhor I'
From Treas'ry benches' most conspicuous end;
i Sir Jtfartin Archer Shee, P.R.A.
SUBJECTS FOR PAINTERS 525
Or Sib.'s mustachios curling with a smile,
As an expectant Premier without guile
Calls him his honourable and gallant friend.
Or Sibthorp travelling in foreign parts,
Through that rich portion of our Eastern charts
Where lies the land of popular tradition ;
And fairly worshipp'd by the true devout
In all his comings-in and goings-out,
Because of the old Turkish superstition.
Fame with her trumpet, blowing very hard,
And making earth rich with celestial lard,
In puffing deeds done through Lord Chamberlain Howe;
While some few thousand persons of small gains,
Who give their charities without such pains,
Look up, much wondering what may be the row.
Behind them Joseph Hume, who turns his pate
To where great Marlbro' House in princely state
Shelters a host of lacqueys, lords and pagos,
And says he knows of dowagers a crowd,
Who, without trumpeting so very loud,
Would do so much, and more, for half the wages.
Limn, sirs, the highest lady in the land,
When Joseph Surface, fawning cap in hand,
Delivers in his list of patriot mortals ;
Those gentlemen of honour, faith, and truth,
Who, foul-mouthed, spat upon her maiden youth,
And dog-like did defile her palace portals.
O *• A
Paint me the Tories, full of grief and woe,
Weeping (to voters) over Frost and Co.,
Their suff'ring, erring, much-enduring brothers.
And in the background don't forget to pack,
Each grinning ghastly from its bloody sack,
The heads of Thistlewood, Despard, and others.
526 POEMS
Paint, squandering the club's election gold,
Fierce lovers of our Constitution old,
Lords who 're that sacred lady's greatest debtors ;
And let the law, forbidding any voice
Or act of Peer to influence the choice
Of English people, flourish in bright letters.
Paint that same dear old lady, ill at ease,
Weak in her second childhood, hard to please,
Unknowing what she ails or what she wishes ;
With all her Carlton nephews at the door,
Deaf'ning both aunt and nurses with their roar,
— Fighting already, for the loaves and fishes.
Leaving these hints for you to dwell upon,
I shall presume to offer more anon. W.
PROLOGUE TO
WEST-LAND MARSTON'S PLAY
'THE PATRICIAN'S DAUGHTER'
[1842]
The Patrician's Daughter was the title bestowed upon a play, in
the tragic vein, by a then unknown writer, J. Westland Marston,
it being his maiden effort in dramatic authorship. Dickens took
great interest in the young man, and indicated a desire to pro-
mote the welfare of his production by composing some introduc-
tory lines. To Macready he wrote: 'The more I think of Mars-
ton's play, the more sure I feel that a prologue to the purpose
would help it materially, and almost decide the fate of any tick-
lish point on the first night. Now I have an idea (not easily
explainable in writing, but told in five words) that would take
the prologue out of the conventional dress of prologues, quite.
Get the curtain up with a dash, and begin the play with a sledge-
hammer blow. If, on consideration, you should agree with me,
I will write the prologue, heartily.' Happily for the author, his
little tragedy was the first new play of the season, and it thus
'THE PATRICIAN'S DAUGHTER' 527
attracted greater attention. Its initial representation took place
at Drury Lane Theatre on December 10, 1842, and the fact that
Dickens's dignified and vigorous lines were recited by Macready,
the leading actor of his day, undoubtedly gave prestige to this
performance; but the play, although it made a sensation for the
moment, did not enjoy a long run, its motive being for some
reason misunderstood. As explained by the Editors of The Let-
ters of Charles Dickens, it was (to a certain extent) an experi-
ment in testing the effect of a tragedy of modern times and in
modern dress, the novelist's Prologue being intended to show that
there need be no incongruity between plain clothes of the nine-
teenth century and high tragedy.
The Patrician's Daughter: A Tragedy in Five Acts, appeared
in pamphlet form during the year prior to its being placed upon
the boards. The Prologue was printed for the first time in the
Sunday Times, December 11, 1842, and then in The Theatrical
Journal and Stranger's Guide, December 17, 1842. By the kind
permission of Miss Hogarth, the lines are here reproduced from
the revised and only correct version in The Letters of Charlet
Dickens.
In the preface to the second edition of the play (1842), the
author thus acknowledges his indebtedness to Dickens for the
Prologue, which, however, does not appear in the book: 'How
shall I thank Mr. Dickens for the spontaneous kindness which
has furnished me with so excellent a letter of introduction to the
audience? The simplest acknowledgment is perhaps the best,
since the least I might say would exceed his estimate of the obli-
gation; while the most I could say would fail to express mine.' —
F. G. K.
THE PROLOGUE
(SPOKEN BY MR. MACREADY)
No tale of streaming plumes and harness bright
Dwells on the poet's maiden harp to-night;
No trumpet's clamour and no battle's fire
Breathes in the trembling accents of his lyre ;
Enough for him, if in his lowly strain ^
He wakes one household echo not in vain;
Enough for him, if in his boldest word
The beating heart of MAN be dimly heard.
528 POEMS
Its solemn music which, like strains that sigh
Through charmed gardens, all who hearing die;
Its solemn music he does not pursue
To distant ages out of human view ;
Nor listen to its wild and mournful chime
In the dead caverns on the shore of Time;
But musing with a calm and steady gaze
Before the crackling flames of living days,
He hears it whisper through the busy roar
Of what shall be and what has been before.
Awake the Present ! Shall no scene display
The tragic passion of the passing day?
Is it with Man, as with some meaner things,
That out of death his single purpose springs?
Can his eventful 1'fe no moral teach
Until he be, for aye, beyond its reach?
Obscurely shall he suffer, act, and fade,
Dubb'd noble only by the sexton's spade?
Awake the Present ! Though the steel-clad age
Find life alone within its storied page,
Iron is worn, at heart, by many still —
The tyrant Custom binds the serf -like will ;
If the sharp rack, and screw, and chain be gone,
These later days have tortures of their own ;
The guiltless writhe, while Guilt is stretch'd in sleep,
And Virtue lies, too often, dungeon deep.
Awake the Present ! what the Past has sown
Be in its harvest garner'd, reap'd, and grown !
How pride breeds pride, and wrong engenders wrong,
Read in the volume Truth has held so long,
Assured that where life's flowers freshest blow,
The sharpest thorns and keenest briars grow,
How social usage has the pow'r to change
Good thoughts to evil ; in its highest range
To cramp the noble soul, and turn to ruth
The kindling impulse of our glorious youth,
Crushing the spirit in its house of clay,
Learn from the lessons of the present day.
A WORD IN SEASON 529
Not light its import and not poor its mien ;
Yourselves the actors, and your homes the scene.
A WORD IN SEASON
FROM 'THE KEEPSAKE'
[1484]
The Keepsake, one of the many fashionable annuals published
during the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, had for its edi-
tor in 1844- the 'gorgeous' Countess of Blessington, the reigning
beauty who held court at Gore House, Kensington, where many
political, artistic, and literary celebrities foregathered — Bulwer
Lytton, Disraeli, Dickens, Ainsworth, D'Orsay, and the rest.
Her ladyship, through her personal charm and natural gifts,
succeeded in securing the services of eminent authors for the
aristocratic publication; even Dickens could not resist her appeal,
and in a letter to Forster (dated July 1843) he wrote: 'I have
heard, as you have, from Lady Blessington, for whose behalf
I have this morning penned the lines I send you herewith. But
I have only done so to excuse myself, for I have not the least
idea of their suiting her; and I hope she will send them back to
you for The Examiner.' Lady Blessington, however, decided to
retain the thoughtful little poem, which was referred to in the
London Review (twenty-three years later) as 'a graceful and
sweet apologue, reminding one of the manner of Hood.' The
theme of the poem, which Forster describes as 'a clever and
pointed parable in verse/ was afterwards satirised in Chadband
(Bleak House}, and in the idea of religious conversion through
the agency of 'moral pocket-handkerchiefs.' — F. G. K.
A WORD IN SEASON
THEY have a superstition in the East,
That ALLAH, written on a piece of paper,
Is better unction than can come of priest,
Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper:
Holding, that any scrap which bears that name,
In any characters, its front imprest on,
530 POEMS
Shall help the finder through the purging flame,
And give his toasted feet a place to rest on.
Accordingly, they make a mighty fuss
With ev'ry wretched tract and fierce oration,
And hoard the leaves — for they are not, like us,
A highly civilised and thinking nation :
And, always stooping in the miry ways,
To look for matter of this earthy leaven,
They seldom, in their dust-exploring days,
Have any leisure to look up to Heaven.
So have I known a country on the earth,
Where darkness sat upon the living waters,
And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth
Were the hard portion of its sons and daughters:
And yet, where they who should have ope'd the door
Of charity and light, for all men's finding,
Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor,
And rent the Book, in struggles for the binding.
The gentlest man among these pious Turks,
God's living image ruthlessly defaces ;
Their best high-churchman, with no faith in works,
Bowstrings the Virtues in the market-places:
The Christian Pariah, whom both sects curse
(They curse all other men, and curse each other),
Walks thro' the world, not very much the worse —
Does all the good he can, and loves his brother.
VERSES FROM THE 'DAILY NEWS'
[1846]
THE Dally News, it will be remembered, was founded in January
1846 by Charles Dickens, who officiated as its first editor. He
soon sickened of the mechanical drudgery appertaining to the
position, and resigned his editorial functions the following month.
From January 21st to March 2nd he contributed to its columns
THE BRITISH LION 531
a series of Travelling Sketches/ afterwards reprinted in vol-
ume form as Pictures from Italy. He also availed himself of the
opportunity afforded him, by his association with that newspaper,
of once more taking up the cudgels against the Tories, and, as in
the case of the Examiner, his attack was conveyed through the
medium of some doggerel verses. These were entitled The Brit-
ish Lion — A New Song, but an Old Story,' to be sung to the
tune of The Great Sea-Snake.' They bore the signature of
'Catnach/ the famous ballad-singer, and were printed in the
Daily News of January 24, 1846.
Three weeks later some verses of a totally different character
appeared in the qolumns of the Daily News, signed in full
'Charles Dickens/ One Lucy Simpkins, of Bremhill (or Brem-
ble), a parish in Wiltshire, had just previously addressed a night
meeting of the wives of agricultural labourers in that county,
in support of a petition for Free Trade, and her vigorous speech
on that occasion inspired Dickens to write The Hymn of the
Wiltshire Labourers,' thus offering an earnest protest against
oppression. Concerning the 'Hymn/ a writer in a recent issue of
Christmas Bells observes : 'It breathes in every line the teaching
of the Sermon on the Mount, the love of the All-Father, the Re-
demption by His Son, and that love to God and man on which
hang all the law and the prophets.' — F. G. K.
I.— THE BRITISH LION
A NEW SONG, BUT AN OLD STORY
TUNE — 'THE GEEAT SEA-SNAKE'
OH, pVaps you may have heard, and if not, I '11 sing
Of the British Lion free,
That was constantly a-going for to make a spring
Upon his en-e-me;
But who, being rather groggy at the knees,
Broke down, always, before;
And generally gave a feeble wheeze
Instead of a loud roar.
Right toor rol, loor rol, fee faw fum,
The British Lion bold !
That was always a-going for to do great things,
And was always being 'sold !'
532 POEMS
He was carried about, in a carawan,
And was show'd in country parts,
And they said, 'Walk up ! Be in time ! He can
Eat Corn-Law Leagues like tarts !'
And his showmen, shouting there and then,
To puff him didn't fail,
And they said, as they peep'd into his den,
'Oh, don't he wag his tail !'
Now, the principal keeper of this poor old beast,
WAN HUMBUG was his name,
Would once ev'ry day stir him up — at least —
And wasn't that a Game !
For he hadn't a tooth, and he hadn't a claw,
In that 'Struggle' so 'Sublime5 ;
And, however sharp they touch'd him on the raw,
He couldn't come up to time.
And this, you will observe, was the reason why
WAN HUMBUG, on weak grounds,
Was forced to make believe that he heard his cry
In all unlikely sounds.
So, there wasn't a bleat from an Essex Calf,
Or a Duke or a Lordling slim ;
But he said, with a wery triumphant laugh,
'I 'm blest if that ain't him.'
At length, wery bald in his mane and tail,
The British Lion growed:
He pined, and declined, and he satisfied
The last debt which he owed.
And when they came to examine the skin,
It was a wonder sore,
To find that the an-i-mal within
Was nothing but a Boar!
Right toor rol, loor rol, fee faw fum,
The British Lion bold!
THE LABOURERS' HYMN 533
That was always a-going for to do great things,
And was always being 'sold !'
CATNACH.
II.— THE HYMN OF THE WILTSHIRE LABOURERS
'Don't you all think that we have a great need to Cry to our
God to put it in the hearts of our greassous Queen and her Mem-
bers of Parlerment to grant us free bread!' — Lucy SIMPKINS, at
Bremhill.
OH God, who by Thy Prophet's hand
Didst smite the rocky brake,
Whence water came, at Thy command,
Thy people's thirst to slake;
Strike, now, upon this granite wall,
Stern, obdurate, and high ;
And let some drops of pity fall
For us who starve and die!
The GOD, who took a little child,
And set him in the midst,
And promised him His mercy mild,
As, by Thy Son, Thou didst :
Look down upon our children dear,
So gaunt, so cold, so spare,
And let their images appear
Where Lords and Gentry are!
Oh GOD, teach them to feel how we,
When our poor infants droop,
Are weakened in our trust in Thee,
And how our spirits stoop;
For, in Thy rest, so bright and fair,
All tears and sorrows sleep :
And their young looks, so full of care,
. Would make Thine Ancrels weep!
534 POEMS
The GOD, who with His finger drew
The Judgment coming on,
Write, for these men, what must ensue,
Ere many years be gone !
Oh GOD, whose bow is in the sky,
Let them not brave and dare,
Until they look (too late) on high,
And see an Arrow there!
Oh GOD, remind them ! In the bread
They break upon the knee,
These sacred words may yet be read,
'In memory of Me!'
Oh GOD, remind them of His sweet
Compassion for the poor,
And how He gave them Bread to eat,
And went from door to door !
CHARLES DICKENS.
LINES ADDRESSED TO MARK LEMON
[1849]
DICKENS, like Silas Wegg, would sometimes 'drop into poetry'
when writing to intimate friends, as, for example, in a letter to
Maclise, the artist, which began with a parody of Byron's lines to
Thomas Moore —
'My foot is in the house,
My bath is on the sea,
And, before I take a souse,
Here 's a single note to thee.'
A more remarkable instance of his propensity to indulge in par-
ody of this kind is to be found in a letter addressed to Mark
Lemon in the spring of 1849. The novelist was then enjoying
a holiday with his wife and daughters at Brighton, whence he
wrote to Lemon (who had been ill), pressing him to pay them a
visit. After commanding him to 'get a clean pocket-handkerchief
ready for the close of "Copperfield" No. 3 — "simple and quiet,
but very natural and touching" — Evening Bore/ Dickens invites
NEW SONG 535
his friend in lines headed 'New Song,' and signed 'T. Sparkler/
the effusion also bearing the signatures of other members of the
family party— Catherine Dickens, Annie Leech, Georgina Ho-
garth, Mary Dickens, Katie Dickens, and John Leech.— F. G. K.
NEW SONG
TUNK — 'LESBIA HATH A BEAMING EYE*
LEMON is a little hipped,
And this is Lemon's true position —
He is not pale, he 's not white-lipped,
Yet wants a little fresh condition.
Sweeter 'tis to gaze upon
Old Ocean's rising, falling billers,
Than on the Houses every one
That form the street called Saint Anne's Willers!
Oh my Lemon, round and fat,
Oh my bright, my right, my tight 'un,
Think a little what you 're at —
Don't stay at home, but come to Brighton !
n
Lemon has a coat of frieze,
But all so seldom Lemon wears it,
That it is a prey to fleas,
And ev'ry moth that 's hungry, tears it.
Oh, that coat 's the coat for me,
That braves the railway sparks and breezes,
Leaving ev'ry engine free
To smoke it, till its owner sneezes !
Then my Lemon, round and fat,
L., my bright, my right, my tight 'un,
Think a little what you 're at—
On Tuesday first, come down to Brighton !
T. SPARKLER.
536 POEMS
POEMS FROM 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS'
[1850-1851]
THE two following poems were discovered recently by means of
the Contributors' Book to Household Words, to which reference
is made in the introductory preface to the present volume.
'Hiram Power's Greek Slave' appeared in that paper on 26th Oc-
tober 1850, and 'Aspire!' on 25th January 1851. — B. W. M.
I.— HIRAM POWER'S GREEK SLAVE
THEY say Ideal Beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
This alien Image with the shackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave : as if the artist meant her
(The passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill expands)
To, so, confront man's crimes in different lands,
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre
Art's fiery finger! and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty, against man's
wrong !
Catch up, in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs, but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.
II.— ASPIRE
ASPIRE! whatever fate befall,
Be it praise or blame —
Aspire ! even when deprived of all —
It is thy nature's aim.
The seed beneath the frozen earth,
When winter checks the fresh green birth,
Still yearningly aspires,
With ripening desires,
And, in its season, it will shoot
PROLOGUE TO 'THE LIGHTHOUSE' 537
Up into the perfect fruit;
But had it not lain low,
It ne'er had learn'd to grow.
Aspire ! for in thyself alone
That power belongs of right;
Within thyself that seed is sown,
Which strives to reach the light;
All pride of rank, all pomp of place,
All pinnacles that point in space,
But show thee, to the spheres,
No greater than thy peers ;
But if thy spirit doth aspire,
Thou risest ever higher — higher —
Towards that consummate end,
When Heavenward we tend.
WILKIE COLLINS'S PLAY
'THE LIGHTHOUSE*
[1855]
WILKIE COLLINS composed two powerful dramas for representa-
tion at Dickens's residence, Tavistock House, a portion of which
had been already adapted for private theatricals, the rooms so
converted being described in the bills as 'The Smallest Theatre
in the World.' The first of these plays was called The Light-
house, and the initial performance took place on June 19, 1855.
Dickens not only wrote the Prologue and 'The Song of the
Wreck,' but signally distinguished himself by enacting the part
of Aaron Gurnock, a lighthouse-keeper, his clever impersonation
recalling Frederick Lemaitre, the only actor he ever tried to
take as a model.
With regard to 'The Song of the Wreck/ Dickens evidently
intended to bestow upon it a different title, for, in a letter ad-
dressed to Wilkie Collins during the preparation of the play, he
said: 'I have written a little ballad for Mary — "The Story of
the Ship's, Carpenter and the Little Boy, in the Shipwreck."1
The song was rendered by his eldest daughter, Mary (who ai-
538 POEMS
sumed the role of Phoebe in the play) ; it was set to the music com-
posed by George Linley for Miss Charlotte Young's pretty ballad,
'Little Nell,' of which Dickens became very fond, and which his
daughter had been in the habit of singing to him constantly since
her childhood. Dr. A. W. Ward, Master of Peterhouse, Cam-
bridge University, refers to 'The Song of the Wreck' as 'a most
successful effort in Cowper's manner.' — F. G. K.
I.— THE PROLOGUE
(Slow music all the time; unseen speaker; curtain down.)
A STORY of those rocks where doom'd ships come
To cast them wreck'd upon the steps of home,
Where solitary men, the long year through —
The wind their music and the brine their view —
Warn mariners to shun the beacon-light ;
A story of those rocks is here to-night.
Eddystone Lighthouse !
( Exterior view discovered. )
In its ancient form,
Ere he who built it wish'd for the great storm
That shiver'd it to nothing,1 once again
Behold outgleaming on the angry main !
Within it are three men ; to these repair
In our frail bark of Fancy, swift as air!
They are but shadows, as the rower grim
Took none but shadows in his boat with him.
So be ye shades, and, for a little space
The real world a dream without a trace.
Return is easy. It will have ye back
Too soon to the old beaten dusty track ;
For but one hour forget it. Billows, rise;
i When Winstanley had brought his work to completion, he is said to
have expressed himself so satisfied as to its strength, that he only wished
he might be there in the fiercest storm that ever blew. His wish was
gratified, and, contrary to his expectations, both he and the building
were swept completely away by a furious tempest which burst along the
coast in November 1703.
THE SONG OF THE WRECK 539
Blow winds, fall rain, be black, ye midnight skies;
And you who watch the light, arise! arise!
(Exterior view rises and discovers the scene.)
II.— THE SONG OF THE WRECK
THE wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
A hundred human creatures saved
Kneel'd down upon the sand.
Three-score were drown'd, three-score were thrown
Upon the black rocks wild,
And thus among them, left alone,
They found one helpless child.
A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred,
Stood out from all the rest,
And gently laid the lonely head
Upon his honest breast.
And travelling o'er the desert wide
It was a solemn joy,
To see them, ever side by side,
The sailor and the boy.
m
In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst,
The two were still but one,
Until the strong man droop'd the first
And felt his labours done.
Then to a trusty friend he spake,
'Across the desert wide,
O take this poor boy for my sake !'
And kiss'd the child and died.
540 POEMS
IV
Toiling along in weary plight
Through heavy jungle, mire,
These two came later every night
To warm them at the fire.
Until the captain said one day,
*O seaman good and kind,
To save thyself now come away,
And leave the boy behind !'
The child was slumbering near the blaze:
'O captain, let him rest
Until it sinks, when God's own ways
Shall teach us what is best!'
They watch'd the whiten'd ashy heap,
They touch'd the child in vain ;
They did not leave him there asleep,
He never woke again.
PROLOGUE TO WILKIE COLLINS'S PLAY
'THE FROZEN DEEP'
[1856]
THE second drama written by Wilkie Collins for the Tavistock
House Theatre was first acted there in January 1857, and subse-
quently at the Gallery of Illustration in the presence of Queen
Victoria and the Royal Family. As in the case of The Light-
House, the play had the advantage of a Prologue in rhyme by
Charles Dickens, who again electrified his audiences by mar-
vellous acting, the character of Richard Wardour (a young naval
officer) being selected by him for representation.
The Prologue was recited at Tavistock House by John Forster,
and at the public performances of the play by Dickens himself.
It is not generally known that a by no means inconsiderable
portion of the drama was composed by Dickens, as testified by
the original manuscripts of the play and of the prompt-book,
'THE FROZEN DEEP' 541
which contain numerous additions and corrections in his hand-
writing. These manuscripts, by the way, realised £300 at Sothe-
by's in 1890.
The main idea of A Tale of Two Cities was conceived by Dick-
ens when performing in The Frozen Deep. 'A strong desire was
upon me then,' he writes in the preface to the story, 'to embody
it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy the state of
mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an ob-
servant spectator, with particular care and interest. As the idea
became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present
form. Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession
of me: I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these
pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself.'
-F. G. K.
THE PROLOGUE
{Curtain rises; mists and darkness; soft music throughout.)
ONE savage footprint on the lonely shore
Where one man listen'd to the surge's roar,
Not all the winds that stir the mighty sea
Can ever ruffle in the memory.
If such its interest and thrall, O then
Pause on the footprints of heroic men,
Making a garden of the desert wide
Where Parry conquer'd death and Franklin died.
To that white region where the Lost lie low,
Wrapt in their mantles of eternal snow, —
Unvisited by change, nothing to mock
Those statues sculptured in the icy rock,
We pray your company ; that hearts as true
(Though nothings of the air) may live for you;
Nor only yet that on our little glass
A faint reflection of those wilds may pass,
But that the secrets of the vast Profound
Within us, an exploring hand may sound,
Testing the region of the ice-bound soul,
Seeking the passage at its northern pole,
Softening the horrors of its wintry sleep,^
Melting the surface of that 'Frozen Deep.'
542 POEMS
Vanish, ye mists • But er» this gloom departs,
And to the union of three sister arts
We give a winter evening, good to know
That in the charms of such another show,
That in the fiction of a friendly play,
The Arctic sailors, too, put gloom away,
Forgot their long night, saw no starry dome,
Hail'd the warm sun, and were again at Home.
Vanish, ye mists ! Not yet do we repair
To the still country of the piercing air;
But seek, before we cross the troubled seas,
An English hearth and Devon's waving trees.
A CHILD'S HYMN
FROM 'THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY'
[1856]
THE Christmas number of Household Words for 1856 is espe-
cially noteworthy as containing the Hymn of five verses which
Dickens contributed to the second chapter. This made a highly
favourable impression, and a certain clergyman, the Rev. R. H.
Davies, was induced to express to the editor of Household Words
his gratitude to the author of these lines for having thus con-
veyed to innumerable readers such true religious sentiments. In
acknowledging the receipt of the letter, Dickens observed that
such a mark of approval was none the less gratifying to him be-
cause he was himself the author of the Hymn. 'There cannot be
many men, I believe,' he added, 'who have a more humble venera-
tion for the New Testament, or a more profound conviction of
its all-sufficiency, than I have. If I am ever (as you tell me I
am) mistaken on this subject, it is because I discountenance all
obtrusive professions of and tradings in religion, as one of the
main causes why real Christianity has been retarded in this world ;
and because my observation of life induces me to hold in un-
speakable dread and horror those unseemly squabbles about the
letter which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands.'
Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, Book xi., iii. — F. G. K.
A CHILD'S HYMN 543
A CHILD'S HYMN
HEAR my prayer, O! Heavenly Father,
Ere I lay me down to sleep;
Bid Thy Angels, pure and holy,
Round my bed their vigil keep.
My sins are heavy, but Thy mercy
Far outweighs them every one;
Down before Thy Cross I cast them,
Trusting in Thy help alone.
Keep me through this night of peril
Underneath its boundless shade;
Take me to Thy rest, I pray Thee,
When my pilgrimage is made.
None shall measure out Thy patience
By the span of human thought;
None shall bound the tender mercies
Which Thy Holy Son has bought.
Pardon all my past transgressions,
Give me strength for days to come;
Guide and guard me with Thy blessing
Till Thy Angels bid me home.
THE BLACKSMITH
FROM 'ALL THE YEAR ROUND*
20, 1859]
IN the chapter of Forster's Life of Dickens dealing with All the
Year Round, the biographer refers to an article of Dickens's in
the first number of that periodical entitled 'The Poor Man and
his Beer,' and states how he came to write it.
The Rev. T. B. Lawes of Rothamsted, St. Albans, had inter-
ested Dickens in a club that had been set oft foot to enable the
544 POEMS
agricultural labourers of the parish to have their beer and pipes
independent of the public-house, and the description of it, says
Mr. Lawes, Vas the occupation of a drive between this place
(Rothamsted) and London, 25 miles. ... In the course of
our conversation I mentioned that the labourers were very jealous
of the small tradesmen, blacksmiths and others, holding allotment
gardens; but that the latter did so indirectly by paying higher
rents to the labourers for a share.' This circumstance is not
forgotten in the verses on the Blacksmith in the same number,
composed by Mr. Dickens and repeated to me while he was walk-
ing about, and which close the mention of his gains with allusion
to:
'A share (concealed) in the poor man's field,
Which adds to the poor man's store.'
It is curious to note that no one has identified this poem as Dick-
ens's before, although the indisputable authority quoted above has
been available to every one since 1873. — B. W. M.
THE BLACKSMITH
OLD England, she has great warriors,
Great princes, and poets great;
But the Blacksmith is not to be quite forgot,
In the history of the State.
He is rich in the best of all metals,
Yet silver he lacks and gold ;
And he payeth his due, and his heart is true,
Though he bloweth both hot and cold.
The boldest is he of incendiaries
That ever the wide world saw,
And a forger as rank as e'er robbed the Bank,
Though he never doth break the law.
He hath shoes that are worn by strangers,
Ye he laugheth and maketh more;
And a share (concealed) in the poor man's field,
Yet it adds to the poor man's store.
THE BLACKSMITH 545
Then, hurrah for the iron Blacksmith!
And hurrah for his iron crew !
And whenever we go where his forges glow,
We '11 sing what A MAN can do.
INDEX
ABERDEEN MINISTRY. See Mr.
Bull's Somnambulist.
Account of an Extraordinary
Traveller, Some, i. 158.
Africa. See Niger Expedition.
African Civilisation Society, i. 47.
Airy, Sir R., ii. 146.
Alderson, Baron, and Chartism, i.
72.
Allen, Captain Wm., R.N., i. -46.
All the Year Round, Address
from, ii. 213.
Miscellanies from, ii. 211.
Althorp, Lord, i. 268.
America and Dickens. See The
Young Man from the Country.
Piracy of British works in, i.
23
'United States of, i. 160.
American Editors, i. 24.
in Europe, An, i. 97.
Notes, ii. 9.
and American Prisons,
etc., i. 185.
Dickens's
justification
for, ii. 240.
Panorama, The, i. 68.
Prisons, i. 178, 192.
Amusements of the People, i. 118.
Arabian Nights, the, i. 284, 339,
492; ii. 30.
Arctic Regions, i. 167.
Voyagers, The Lost, i. 462.
Artists' Models. See An Idea of
Mine.
Ashley, Lord, i. 200, 207.
Aspire! ii. 536.
Athenaeum Club, ii. 158.
Attah of Iddah, i. 56.
Australia, The Fine Arts in,
202.
ii.
BABY, THE GREAT, ii. 72.
Balaklava, ii. 25.
Ballantyne, i. 7.
Humbug Handled, The, i. 6.
Reply to, i. 20.
Bank of England, ii. 26.
Bankrupts, ii. 135.
Banvard's Geographical Panora-
ma of the Mississippi and Mis-
souri Rivers, i. 68.
Barmaids, ii. 104.
Barnacle Family, ii. 184.
Bastille, i. 342.
Beer, The Poor Man and his, ii.
214, 543.
Best Authority, The, ii. 153.
Betterton as Lear, i. 1, 6.
Betting-Shops, i. 317.
Bickerstaff, Isaac, i. 72.
Birch's Turtle Soup Shop, i. 211.
Birmingham, i. 9-2.
and Wolverhampton Railway,
i. 406.
See Fire and Snow.
-Workmen, i. 162.
Black-Eyed Susan, i. 95.
Blacksmith, The, ii. 543.
Blessington, Lady, ii. 272.
Bloomer, Mrs. Colonel. See Suck-
ing Pigs.
i. 397.
Bloomsbury Christening, The. See
An Enlightened Clergyman.
Board of Health, i. 82, 250, 449.
Bobadil, Captain, ii. 249.
Boheme, i. 2.
Booley, Mr., i. 158.
A Card from, i. 170.
Booley's, Mr., View of the Lord
Mayor's Show, i. 171.
Booth, i. 2.
Boston, U.S.A., i. 23.
Boteler, i. 1.
Boythorn and Landor, ii. 266, 971.
Bradshaw's Guide. See A Narra-
tive of Extraordinary Suffering.
Brewster, Sir David, ii. 248, 261.
Bribery. See That Other Public.
Bridge, Sir Frederick, ii. 519.
Bright, John, ii 234.
British Army, ii. 7.
Banner, ii. 247.
547
548
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
British Lion, The, ii. 531.
Brougham, Lord, i. 207, 284; ii.
261
Buff on, i. 137.
Bull, Crisis in the Affairs of John,
i. 215.
Mr., and National Jest-Book,
i. 236-7.
See Our Commission.
Bull's, Mrs., Curlpapers, i. 243.
Bull's Somnambulist, Mr., i. 223.
Bunyan, John, ii. 78.
Burnett, Henry, ii. 515.
Burns, Robert, ii. 142.
Buxton, Sir T. F., i. 47.
CALCRAFT. See The Finishing
School-master.
Campbell, Lord, ii. 140.
Dr. J., ii. 247.
Cannibalism. See The Lo»t Arctic
Voyagers.
Capital and Labour, i. 414.
Carlyle, Thomas, i. 297, 337, 420.
Carr, Alfred, i. 48.
Celestial Empire, i. 37.
Chartism, i. 71.
Chartists, i. 71, 91.
Cheap Patriotism, Ii. 59.
Child's Hymn, A, ii. 542.
Chinese Junk, Keying, i. 37.
Chips, ii. 200.
Christianisation of Africa, i. 62-3.
Christianity and Bishops, i. 309.
— - True Doctrines of, and Pa-
gans, i. 46.
Christmas Carol, A, from Pick-
wick, ii. 516.
Church Catechism and the Com-
mandments, i. 36.
Crisis. See Critit in the Af-
fairs of John Bull.
of England Missionary So-
ciety, i. 47.
Chuzzlewit and America, ii. 9.
'Cinderella' on the improved plan,
i. 395.
Circumlocution Office, ii. 163.
Civil Servants. See The Toady
Tree and Cheap Patriotism.
Claxton, Marshall, ii. 202.
Club House, Farm Labourers', ii.
216.
Cock Lane Ghost, ii. 204, 248.
Coles, Rev. T. S., ii. 246.
Collins, Wilkie, ii. 245, 457, 537,
540.
Colman, Henry, i. 97-8.
Common Council, i. 214.
Cooper, Mr., i. 23.
Corruption. See That Other Pub-
lic.
Court Ceremonies (Funerals), i.
107.
Court-Martial at Windsor, ii. 83.
Covent Garden, i. 339.
—Theatre, i. 1, 29.
Crime and Poverty. See Pet Prit-
oners.
London, i. 34.
Crimean War, ii. 146, 156.
Criminal Law, Five New Points
of, ii. 224.
Crisis in the Affairs of John Bull,
i. 215.
Cromwell, Oliver, i. 375.
Crowquill, Alfred, ii. 516.
Cruikshank, George, and Fairy
Tales. See Frauds on the Fair-
ies.
the value of his work, i.
81.
Cruikshank's, George, 'The Drunk-
ard's Children,' i. 41.
Curious Misprint in the Edin-
burgh Review, ii. 160.
Currency, a Slight Depreciation of
the, ii. 82.
Daily News, the, Verses from, ii.
530.
Dante, ii. 141.
Darling, Grace, i. 306.
Davies, Rev. R. H., ii. 549.
Day and Martin's blacking, i. 106.
Death, Trading in, i. 325.
Debtors' prison, i. 8.
December Vision, A, i. 244.
Dedlock, Sir Leicester, ii. 271.
Demeanour of Murderers, The, ii.
120.
Derby, Lord, i. 421; ii. 234.
Dickens and the negress, 1. 185-6
note.
Disraeli, Mr., ii. 234.
Divorce, ii. 133.
Dixon, Hepworth, i. 182.
Dodd, Dr., i. 190.
INDEX
549
Dogs, Gone to the, II. 1&
Don Quixote, i. 339.
D'Orsay, Count, ii. 272.
Dove, Mr., the case of, ii. 132.
Dramatic Licenser of Plays, i. 127.
Dreaming, Railway, ii. 112,
Dress, ii. 88-9.
Drouet, i. 182, 359.
The Verdict for, i. 92.
Drouet's Pauper Children's Farm
at Tooting, i. 81.
Drunkenness, ii. 72, 80.
EARLY CLOSIXG MOVEMENT, ii. 92.
Edinburgh Apprentice School, i.
76.
Edinburgh Review, ii. 160.
Education, i. 251, 302, 447; ii. 152.
Popular, i. 394.
Want of, the cause of crime.
See Ignorance and Crime.
Egypt, i. 165.
Egyptian Hall, i. 68.
Engine Drivers and Firemen. See
Railway Strikes.
England, Misgovernment of, ii. 7.
Enlightened Clergyman, An, ii.
245.
Esquimaux, i. 464.
European Life and Manners, i.
97-8.
Euston Station, i. 453.
Eva the Betrayed, or the Lady of
Lambythe, i. 129.
Everybody, Nobody, Somebody, ii.
126.
Examiner, the Miscellanies from, I.
1; ii. 3; Political Squibs from,
ii. 520.
Executioner, The Public. See The
Finishing Schoolmaster.
Exeter Hall, i. 45; ii. 79.
Exhibition of 1851, i. 252.
Extraordinary Suffering, A Nar-
rative of, i. 288.
Traveller, Some Account of
an, i. 158.
FAIRIES, GASLIGHT, ii. 10.
Fairy Tales. See Frauds on the
Fairies.
Faraday, Professor, ii. 248, 261.
Fast and Loose, ii. 26.
Feenix, Cousin, ii. 216.
Fergusson, Sir Adam, i. 6 note.
Few Conventionalities, A, i. 282.
Field, Rev. Mr., i. 187.
Fine Arts, ii. 90.
in Australia, The, ii. 203.
Fine Old English Gentleman, The,
ii. 520.
Finishing Schoolmaster, The, i.
276.
Fire and Snow, i. 406.
First of April, Stores for the, ii.
140.
Fitzgerald, Percy, ii. 519.
Five New Points of Criminal Law,
ii. 224.
Fool, the, in Lear, i. 3.
Forster, John, ii. 266.
Franklin, Benjamin, i. 373.
Sir John, i. 462 note.
Frauds on the Fairies, i. 392.
Free Trade, i. 394.
French Art, ii. 90.
Revolution of 1790, i. 72.
Friend of the Lions, The, ii. 100.
Frozen Deep, Prologue to the, ii.
540.
Funerals, i. 108, 142, 325.
GABRIEL GRUB'S SONG, ii. 517.
Galland, M., ii. 30.
Gamp, Mr., ii. 74.
Mrs., ii. 142, 184.
Garrick, i. 2.
Garrick's Hamlet, i. 20.
Gaslight Fairies, ii. 10.
Ghost of Cock Lane Ghost wrong
again, The, ii. 204.
Oil Bias, i. 339.
Gilray, i. 78.
Goldsmith, Oliver, Life of, ii. 267.
Gone Astray, i. 380.
Gone to the Dogs, ii. 18.
Good Hippopotamus, The, i. 152.
Good-Natured Man, i. 190.
Gordon, Sheriff, and the influence
of schools, i. 78.
Gorham Controversies, i. 316.
Government offices, officials' ways,
etc. See Our Commission.
Government officials. See Cheap
Patriotism.
Grainger, Dr., i. 82.
Great Baby, The, ii. 72.
550
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Greek Slave, Hiram Power's, ii.
536.
Grey, Lord, i. 178.
Grundy, Mrs., i. 144.
Guildhall, The, i. 383.
Guild of Literature and Art, The,
i. 271.
HADJI BABA, ii. 138.
Hall, Mr., Magistrate, ii. 80.
Hamlet in Provinces, ii. 13.
Hampton Court, ii. 181, 186.
Ha-agman, The Public, i. 277. See
The Finishing Schoolmaster.
Hanwell, i. 373.
Happy Family, From the Raven
in the, i. 132, 137, 152.
Harris, Mrs., ii. 252.
Haunted House, A, i. 373.
Hayward, Mr., ii. 145.
Henderson, i. 2.
Highbury Barn, i. 169.
Hill, Rowland, i. 136, 142, 200; ii.
163.
Hogarth and Cruikshank, i. 41-2.
Hogarth, George, i. 13.
Holborn Union, i. 86.
Holloway, Professor, ii. 131.
Home, Daniel Dunglas, ii. 251, 255.
Home for Homeless Women, i.
348.
Homoeopathy, ii. 201.
Hood, Thomas, ii. 265.
Horse Racing. See Betting-Shops.
Household Words, addresses and
announcements from, i. 113-17.
Miscellanies from, i. 111.
Poems from, ii. 536.
House of Commons, ii. 72, 185.
See A Haunted House.
See The Thousand and
One Humbugs.
Housing of the Poor. See To
Working Men.
Howitt, Mr., and Spiritualism.
See Rather a Strong Dose and
The Martyr Medium.
Hudson's Bay Company, i. 463.
Hullah, John, i. 285; ii. 144, 317.
Humbugs, The Thousand and One,
ii. 30.
Hunt, Leigh: A Remonstrance, ii.
226.
Robert, i. 64.
Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers,
The, ii. 533.
IDEA OF MINE, AN, ii. 176.
Ignorance and Crime, i. 34.
Imprisonment. See Things that
Cannot be Done.
Inchbald, Mrs., ii. 264.
India, i. 167.
House, The, i. 386.
Individuality of Locomotives, The,
ii, 200.
Inglis, Sir Robert, i. 40.
Insolvent Court, i. 9.
Insularities, ii. 87.
International Copyright, i. 23.
Ireland, Her Majesty's visit to. I.
164.
Irving, Washington, i. 23.
Is She his Wife? ii. 373.
It is not Generally Known, i. 430.
Ivy Green, The, ii. 515.
'JACK THE GIANT KILLEH,' i. 339.
James, W. R., i. 86.
Jeffrey, Lord, ii. 161.
Jenner, Dr., i. 239.
John Bull, play, i. 285.
Johnson, Dr., ii. 140.
and Cock Lane Ghost, ii.
249.
Jokes, Legal and Equitable, i. 438.
Judicial Special Pleading, i. 71.
KEAN, i. 2.
Keepsake, the, ii. 529.
Kemble, i. 2.
Ketch, John, i. 277.
King Boy, i. 46.
Obi, i. 46.
Kingsmill, Rev. Mr., i. 191.
Kitton, F. G. See Notes to Poems.
LABOUR PARLIAMENT, i. 422.
Lamb, Charles, i. 43.
Lamplighter, The; a Farce, ii. 395.
Lander's Life, by John Forster, ii.
266.
Landseer, Edwin, ii. 524. See also
A Friend of the Lions.
Lansdowne, Marquis of, ii. 235.
Last Words of the Old Year, i.
429.
Latour, M., de St Ytres, i. 95.
INDEX
551
Laurie, Sir Peter, i. 37.
Lawes, The Rev. T. B., ii. 543.
Laws of England, The. See Things
'.hat Cannot be Done and Legal
and Equitable Jokes.
Leech, John, the value of his work,
i. 78.
Leech's 'The Rising Generation,' i.
78.
Legal and Equitable Jokes, i. 259-
60.
L. E. L., i. 34 note.
Lemon, Mark, ii. 425.
lines addressed to, ii. 534.
Leslie, C. R., R.A., i. 27.
Lighthouse, The, Prologue to, ii.
537.
Lind, Jenny, i. 333; ii. 9.
Lions, A Friend of the, ii. 100.
Literature and Art, The Guild of,
i. 271.
Little Dorrit, ii. 161.
Lively Turtle, i. 208.
Liverpool Mechanics' Institute, i.
76.
Lockhart, J. G., i. 8.
Locomotives, The Individuality of,
ii. 200.
London, i. 210.
City of. See Gone Astray.
Lord Chamberlain's Office, The, i.
109.
Lord Mayor, Reflections of a, i.
457.
The, i. 385.
Lord Mayor's Show, Mr. Booley's
View of, i. 171.
Lost Arctic Voyagers, The, i. 462.
Lucan, Lord, ii. 146.
Lushington, Dr., i. 47.
Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, i. 275.
MACAULAY, ii. 92.
Macconnochie, Captain, i. 179, 192.
MacLean, Governor, of Cape Coast
Castle, i. 34.
Maclise, Daniel, ii. 524.
Macready, ii. 265, 290.
and' The Patrician's Daughter,
ii. 526.
as Benedick, i. 25.
as Lear, i. 1.
Magistrate,, The Worthy, ii. 80.
Man, The horse's views on, i. 148-9.
Manning, Mr., i. 184.
Mansion House, The, i. 386.
Marble Arch, i. 270.
Marston, Westland, ii. 526.
Martineau, Miss, i. 188.
Martyr Medium, The, ii. 255.
Marylebone Theatre, i. 95 note.
Matz, B. W. See Introduction,
and Notes, ii. 536, 544.
May Morning, or The Mystery of
1715, and the Murder, i. 120.
McWilliam, Dr., i. 60.
Metropolitan Police, Summary of
Convictions 1847, i. 34.
Mexico, the Conquest of, i. 491.
Micawberism, ii. 162.
Millennial Gazette, ii. 143.
Mills, Mr., i. 82.
Mines and Manufactories, Children
and Young Persons employed in,
i. 30.
Mississippi River, i. 68, 160.
Missouri River, i. 68, 160.
Modern Novelists, The License of,
ii. 160.
Money, Misuse of. See A Slight
Depreciation of the Currency.
Montague, Wortley, ii. 30.
Morier, Mr., ii. 138.
Morning Post, ii. 143.
Mr. Nightingale's Diary, ii. 425.
Murdered Person, The, ii. 130, 224.
Murderers, The Demeanour of, ii.
120.
Murderous Extremes, ii. 136.
NAPIER, SIR CHARLES, i. 431.
Narrative of Extraordinary Suffer-
ing, A, i. 288.
National Jest-Book, Proposals for
a, i. 236.
Natural History of Creation, i. 64.
Negress and Dickens, i. 186 note.
Nelson, ii. 7.
Nepaulese Princes, i. 147.
Newgate, i. 342.
Newman, i. 316.
New Orleans, i. 160.
New Song. To Mark Lemon, n.
535.
Newspaper, Provincial. See Thf
Tattlesnivel Bleater,
New Testament, i. 37.
New Year's Day, ii. 187.
552
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
New Zealand, i. 162.
Niger Expedition, The Narrative
of, 1841, i. 45.
Nightingale's Diary, Mr., ii. 425.
Nightly Scene in London, A, ii. 95.
Nobody, Somebody, and Every-
body, ii. 126.
No Popery, i. 249.
Controversy. See Crisis
in the A fairs of John Bull.
Northumberland House, i. 387.
No Thoroughfare, ii. 457.
OLD BAILEY, i. 438; ii. 184.
Lamps for New Ones, i. 193.
Year, Last Words of, i. 249.
On Strike, i. 412.
Our Commission, i. 229.
Owen, Robert, and Spiritism, i.
372; ii. 143.
Oxenford, John, i. 95.
Oxford Colleges, i. 252.
University, i. 29.
PADDLE-BOX BOATS, i. 250.
Paine, Thomas, The Pilgrimage of,
i. 365.
Painters, Subjects for, ii. 524.
Paley, ii. 248.
Pall Mall, ii. 158.
Pall Mall Gazette, the, ii. 265.
Palmerston, Lord, ii. 233.
Palmer, Wm., ii. 120 note.
Pantomimes. See Gaslight Fairies.
Paradise at Tooting, The, i. 81.
Pariahs. See The Sunday Screw.
Paris, ii. 196.
Parisian Life. See Railway
Dreaming.
Parliament, ii. 136.
Houses of. See A Haunted
House.
i. 433; ii. 5. And see The
Thousand and One Humbugs.
Labour, i. 422.
Parliamentary Election, i. 378-9.
Patrician's Daughter, The, Pro-
logue to, ii. 526.
Patriotism, Cheap, ii. 59.
Peace Society. See Whole Hogs.
Peel, Frederick, i. 238.
Penny Postage, ii. 165.
Readings in Suffolk. See An
Enlightened Clergyman,
Pentonville Prison, i. 177.
People, The, i. 446.
See The Great Baby.
Amusements of, i. 1 18.
Perfect Felicity in a Bird's-Eye
View, i. 132.
Pet Prisoners, i. 177.
Picture Exhibition, ii. 176.
Pilgrim's Progress, the, i. 432.
Pipchin, Mrs., ii. 188.
Platt, Baron, i. 93.
Plays, ii. 275.
Please to Leave your Umbrella, ii.
181.
Poems, ii. 513.
Poetry of Science, The, i. 64.
Police, ii. 151.
Political Economy, i. 413-14.
Poor Law Act, i. 89.
Commissioners, i. 84.
Inspector, i. 84.
Man and his Beer, The, ii. 214,
543.
Posterity, Proposals for Amusing,
i. 343.
See Gone to the Dogs.
Post Office and Sunday Letters.
See The Sunday Screw.
Power, Hiram, ii. 536.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. See
Old Lamps for New Ones.
Prescott, W. H., i. 23, 491.
Press, Liberty of, ii. 6.
Preston strike, i. 412-13.
Prince Consort, i. 47; ii. 231.
Prince of Wales, ii. 232.
Prison Discipline, by Rev. Mr.
Field, i. 185.
Prisons, ii. 131.
Proposals for a National Jest-
Book, i. 236.
for Amusing Posterity, i. 343.
Protestantism, ii. 247. See also
Christianity and Church.
Public, That Other, ii. 3.
Punch, i. 78.
Punishment of Crime. See Things
that Cannot be Done.
Pusey, i. 316.
QUACK DOCTOR'S PROCLAMATION,
THE, ii. 522.
Queen Dowager, Adelaide, Funeral
of, i. 108.
INDEX
553
Queen Victoria, i. 49, 164, 275; ii.
231.
Question of Fact, A Slight, ii. 265.
Quin, i. 2.
RADICAL, DICKENS AS A, ii. 520.
Rae, Dr., i. 463.
Ragged Schools, i. 308, 356.
Ragged School Union. See A
Sleep to Startle us.
Raglan, Lord, ii. 148.
Railway Companies, ii. 3, 26.
• Dreaming, ii. 112.
Strikes, i. 255. See also On
Strike.
• Terminus. See An Unsettled
Neighbourhood.
Travelling. See A Narrative
of Extraordinary Suffering.
See Fire and Snow.
Rather a Strong Dose, ii. 247.
Raven in the Happy Family, i. 132,
137, 152.
Reade, Charles, ii. 160.
Ready Wit, ii. 204.
Red Riven the Bandit, i. 124.
Red Tape, i. 263.
Reflections of a Lord Mayor,
457.
Reformation, The, ii. 247.
Reform Club, ii. 159.
Reid, Dr., i. 47.
Relations, Smuggled, ii. 65.
Religion and Education, i. 447.
Report of the Commissioners ap-
pointed to inquire into the Con-
dition of the Persons variously
engaged in the University of Ox-
ford, i. 29.
Restoration of Shakespeare's Lear
to the Stage, i. 1.
Reviewers, ii. 105.
Rising Generation, The, i. 78.
Robinson Crusoe, i. 338, 394.
Rocky Mountains, i. 160.
Romance from Pickwick, ii. 518.
Ross, Sir James, i. 167.
Rothschild, i. 10.
Rowlandson, i. 78.
Royal Literary Fund, i. 238.
Royalty, ii. 93.
Russell, Henry, ii. 515.
Lord John, i. 47, 226 note, 229.
Russian Emperor, i. 227 note.
ST. DUNSTAX'S CHUBCH, i. 382.
St. Giles's Church, i. 381.
St. Paul's Cathedral, i. 383.
Sala, G. A., ii. 3 note.
Schoolboy: what he knows, ii. 105.
Schoolmaster, The Finishing, i. 276.
Schools, the influence and use of, i.
76-7.
Scott (Sir Walter), and his Pub-
lishers, i. 6.
Sentimental Journey, ii. 182.
Seymour, Lord, i. 448.
Shakespeare, i. 68, 318; ii. 150.
Shakespeare's Coriolanus, i. 29.
Lear, i. 1.
Much Ado About Nothing, i.
25.
• Romeo and Juliet, L 96.
Shaving, ii. 90.
Shee, Sir Martin, ii. 524.
Shekinah, the, i. 365.
Shipwrecks. See The Lost Arctic
Voyagers, II.
Sibthorp, ii. 524.
Simpkins, Lucy, ii. 531.
Sinbad the Sailor, i. 386 ; ii. 30.
Skimpole, Harold, original of, ii.
228.
Slave-Trade, abolition of, in Af-
rica, i. 46.
Sleep to Startle us, A, i. 308.
Slight Depreciation of the Curren-
cy, A, ii. 82.
Question of Fact, A, ii. 265.
Smith, Albert, and the ascent of
Mont Blanc, i. 490.
Dr. Southwood, i. 267.
Sydney, i. 81, 438; ii. 82, 161.
Smithfield Market, i. 214.
Smuggled Relations, ii. 65.
Social Oysters, i. 169, 170, 176.
Soho Bazaar, ii. 187.
Solitary confinement in Prison.
See Pet Prisoners.
Somebody, Nobody, Everybody, ii.
126.
Song of the Wreck, The, ii. 539.
Spirit Business, The, i. 366.
Manifestations, i. 366; ii. 204.
Rappings in Cincinnati, i. 366.
Teachings, i. 366.
Spiritism in America. See Th«
Spirit Business.
554
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
Spiritual Intercourse, The Philos-
ophy of, i. 365.
Spiritualism, ii. 140, 167.
See Rather a Strong Dose and
The Martyr Medium.
Spiritual Telegraph, New York, i.
365; ii. 140.
Stage, Restoration of Shake-
speare's Lear to the, i. 1.
Stanfield, Clarkson, i. 69.
— the late Mr., ii. 263.
Sterne's Sentimental Journey, i.
339.
Stores for the First of April, ii.
140.
Strange Gentleman, The, ii. 277.
Strikes, i. 255, 412.
Subjects for Painters, ii. 524.
Sucking Pigs, i. 302.
Sunday observance, i. 435; ii. 134.
See The Great Baby.
See The Sunday Screw.
Post, i. 199.
Screw, The, i. 199.
Supposing! ii. 205.
Tale of Two Cities, A, conception
of, ii. 541.
Talfourd, Mr. Justice, i. 428.
Tate's, Mr. Nahum, version of
Lear, i. 1.
Tattlesnivel Bleater, The, ii. 230.
Teetotalism, i. 394.
Temperance Society. See Whole
Hogs.
Temple Bar, i. 382.
Thackeray, W. M., ii. 160.
That Other Public, ii. 3.
Theatres, ii. 4.
Fees in, ii. 4.
the, i. 118, 171; ii. 265. See
also Gaslight Fairies.
Thiers and the French Revolution,
i. 73.
Things that Cannot be Done, i. 401.
Thomson, Dr. T. R. H., i. 45 note.
Thousand and One Humbugs, The,
ii. 30.
Times, the, i. 446; ii. 7, 133, 149,
238.
Tipping, ii. 4.
Toady Tree, The, ii. 53.
Tooting, The Paradise at, i. 81.
Tooting, Drouet's Pauper Chil-
dren's Farm at, i. 81.
Farm, The, i. 89.
Toynbee, Mr., i. 268.
Total Abstinence, i. 394.
Tradesmen's Moral Association
Betting-Club, i. 322.
Trading in Death, i. 325.
Trenck, Baron, i. 342.
Trotter, Capt. H. D., R.N., i. 45
note.
Tulloch, Colonel, ii. 146.
Turpin, Bold (Song), ii. 519.
UMBRELLA, PLEASE TO LEAVE YOUR,
ii. 181.
United States of America, i. 160.
Unsettled Neighbourhood, An, i.
450.
VACCINATION-, i. 239.
Vegetarianism, i. 394.
Vegetarian Society. See Whole
Hogs.
Vicar of Wakefteld, The, i. 432.
Village Coquettes, The, ii. 317.
Virginie, i. 95.
WAKLET, MR., i. 82.
War, conduct of, ii. 127.
Muddles, ii. 146.
Warren's Blacking, i. 106.
Washington, Congress at, i. 23.
Well-Authenticated Rappings, ii.
167
Welter's, Sam, Song, ii. 518.
Wellington, Duke of, ii. 7, 146.
Wellington's Funeral. See Trading
in Death.
Whateley, Archbishop, i. 179.
Where we Stopped Growing, i. 337.
Whig Governments, i. 438.
Whitechapel Workhouse, ii. 95.
White Woman of Berners Street,
i. 341.
Whole Hogs, i. 295. See also
Frauds on the Fairies.
Why? ii. 104.
Wilde, Sir Thomas, ii. 165.
Willmore, Graham, i. 441.
Wiltshire Labourers, The Hymn
of, ii. 533.
Window Tax. See Red Tape.
Windsor, Court Martial at, ii. 83.
INDEX
555
Wit, Ready, ii. 204.
Wolverhampton. See Fire and
Snow.
Y.'omen and the Lav.'. See Things
that Ca.'A. ' be Done.
- Homeless, i. 348.
Word in Season, A, ii. 529.
Workhouse, £t. Pancras, i. 179.
Working Men, To, i. 446.
Worthy Magistrate, The, ii. 80.
YOUNG MAX FROM THE COUNTRY,
THE, ii. 238.
Ytres, Latour de St., i. 95.
ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, THE, i. 155;
ii. 100.
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